and I never usually take the things guys tell me in the bitter heat of rejection to heart, but on that particular day, at that particular moment... I had been particularly assailable to the prickly sensation of verbal harassment. It wasn't my fault, really, I had been forcibly ejected from my cushy nine to five and kicked to the wayside by a girl half my age and a third as sentient. Or maybe I too, am swayed by the bitterness of rejection, the thought comforts me as much as it stings. 

So I go on home and there he is, here I was, so it was and as it will always be and have been. Which is to say, fuck the endless tedium of slow forays into the dating scene and scenes of which I find myself helplessly held captive by the whims of the forever unpleased. Maybe if I was the insecure young woman who made the damned account in the first place, the lesson would be that I am never good enough, but if that were only so. 

I take my leave and arrive at the party I'd have invented any excuse not to attend any other evening. My friends are equally shocked and appeased, taking my appearance as victory, in stride they flock and flatter. I let their laughter subsume my gloom and attempt to assimilate like a gas in the air, hoping to become just as imperceptible. But like a smog I only seem to attract more and more of that sickly sweet attention, so much I question my own motives for coming. I'd been offended by an insinuation by a man I had never even undressed for, suggesting that I took sadistic pleasure in leading the poor boys on only to run from the proverbial, sexual altar. I told him for a quick buck and a quicker fuck he would do well to visit a house of professionals, rather than haunt my own. 

Only here I am now, wearing a shiny wrapper for the would-be birthday boy that catches my eye. My only concern is of his tan and his willingness to never talk to me again. I take solace in the fact that I'd be nigh unrecognisable if our paths crossed on the street, my impulsive transformation had been tinted by bleeding insecurity from the young afternoon's distant criticisms. It makes sense that I'd want to let off steam tonight, I no longer have work in the morning. 

My friends flutter as fast as they had swarmed me, the new toy quickly becomes boring to play with when it doesn't share your proper improv etiquette. Yes and performative niceties are not just the implements of fairweather friends, but I'm too self absorbed in the moment to see it as anything but a chore to laugh at the dead air. I remind myself to send Karen a text in the morning to say I had a great time, she'll forget all about any abrasive attitudes in all that mental fog. 

On to the task at hand. I tell myself this isn't just a hunt for casual, stringless sex, but I'm less convincing than my oh so apologetic employers had been with their kind farewells. I make quite the snag, my jade dress shiny and tight, seeming to curve this body in ways my seven a.m. slump could only dream of. A goddess of glitter and giving. Giving so much as to give myself to anyone with the gall to make me laugh in this cemetery of humour. Giving in to the powerful gaze of a guy across the sea of heads that bob up and down and all around to the dreary beat of a forgotten summer's anthem. 

Except those aren't the same kind of eyes I usually catch nor those I am usually caught by, such green greens. My dress can't compete, with its cheap plastic glare. Garish. I take the time to inspect those distant beacons that signal me from across the room and come to an alarming, enticing end in my investigation. Those are the eyes of a woman, eyes dashed by lashes that batt and bait those reflected inside... those would be mine. 

I take a hesitant step closer, but the wholeness of her eyes gives me pause. I've never even considered the pull of a woman before, my own beauty had never stirred me in the way it has my unlucky suitors. So perhaps that is why I start to wonder what she sees in my eyes that could compare to the fullness of her own. Complete in their intensity, but there's a softness there too. It beckons and I fidget with my phone, like I'm suddenly in danger.

Maybe so... 

...but there's a curiosity burning into the back of my eyes that seems to be coming from hers. I find my heart just as panicked and unsure, but it steadies as the scene simmers. 

All until she begins to move, a step here and there, a greeting to those she passes as graceful and dexterous as each step. I no longer doubt her target, I feel the crosshairs make mine stand on end, finding myself snared and bound. It must be a trick of the gin in my cup, but her eyes never seem to leave my own as the mystery woman deftly traverses the crowd ahead. Even as she squeezes arms and kisses cheeks, her eyes are a tether and I find myself unable to shift from my spot. Only my breath hitched, letting me know my curiosity is beginning to mutate into something entirely different. Something foreign, an alien sensation of desire or compulsion that makes me feel more parasite than person. Like I'm one part of a greater whole, a whole that is swiftly closing in and threatening to reclaim me. 

Those green eyes make me feel in my place, which I am, in a place. A distant, fuzzy place that was once a lively party but is now a quiet room. A room with no door or discernible features, but painted with lush jade walls that seem to suggest a power that is lost on lesser imaginations. The question of my own imagination is an unanswered one, as I am too lost in the reflection of the impossibly lustrous wall. By the time I can shake from stupor she is already here. I feel her hand squeeze my arm and wring me from that quiet room and into the party again. 

I look down at her hand, those glossy nails filed into straight curves. Her mouth moves and I'm too distracted to understand her, or maybe she speaks in a dead tongue. I curse myself for having dropped Latin studies thinking I would never need such knowledge. She giggles at my joke, or maybe I do, privately, but her hand meets my cheek either way and my face tilts up into that reflective Jade and I am once again in an empty room that demands my attention.

Thick black lines that frame endless eyes which hold me in place long after the hand leaves my cheek. 

Shifting lips that hex me in language ancient and dead, or so I can only hazard to guess, my ear seems tardy, too laissez-faire to bother translating for me in any case. 

Lights move and dim overhead, or am I changing rooms? It's so hard to focus, but increasingly easy to follow.

I am set upon by gorgeous eyes as fingers push down, my shoulders slack and my weight shifts onto something soft. Still, those eyes never leave my sight. Never stop filling my head with happy. Is it happy? Happiness? Empty? Emptiness? Am I repeating those words? I'm saying something, a ghost of speech, long forgotten by the time the words are excised. 

Maybe I do like women? I think this in a moment of clarity as I realise my infatuation from a sudden outside perspective. There's two rooms. In one room, I'm sitting down on a barstool as the most attractive woman I've ever laid eyes upon is speaking so nonchalant. 

In the other room, I'm surrounded by nothing but the woman's pretty green eyes. I'm surprisingly calm, but the words are all so distant and muffled. I should be unsettled, but I'm surprisingly calm. I'm surprisingly calm, but I feel like I could fall over if she stops letting me lean on her so nicely... I can't even close my eyes anymore, but I'm surprisingly quite calm. 

Breathing steady, in and out. Forgetting things I shouldn't remember. What, you ask? 

I'm forgetting that I can't speak that ancient, dead tongue that snakes into my ear and makes me feel special and makes me smile and makes me sultry. I push my thighs together and I purse my lips, I try to concentrate on those words I'm too forgetful to not understand. 

She's telling me to look deeper into those eyes of her and I'm all to happy to oblige, eager to accept the oblivion. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see god. I know that she isn't god, for none may see him and live, but staring up into the eyes of this goddess makes me feel so alive that I begin to fray. 

I want to stare into her eyes until I sublimate myself. I think somewhere deep inside I know that they can only take, but I also find the urge to give becomes irresistible in its toxic allure. Eyes that make me self destructive, living out fantasies in my head between myself and this mystery woman.

I'm told to stare even deeper and I start to worry that I'll be consumed entirely. How do I look deeper? How can I obey such an unreasonable demand? 

And yet I oblige, because I have no other recourse. 

I take a second to kiss goodbye to whatever the fuck was holding me back from giving myself over to her. 

She kisses me in thanks and I feel fingers twist in my hair, I feel knots tangle in my head and lips curling all over the shop. 

Eyes make me feel needed and happy and owned and wanted and loved and seen and weak and good and silly and hope and want and gone. 

Tangled up in cords of green that spiral out from quiet walls that are polished to a perfect sheen. I see myself and I see her eyes. I see these reflections returned infinitely and I see mirrors within mirrors in mirrors in eyes of jade. I don't know what any of it means other than that it makes me feel good.

So, so good that I don't think to stop and question. Thinking means resisting, fighting the waves of pleasure that rock over me as fingers ride up and down in places I let them wander. Nowhere is off limits of course, I do try and plead for her to be gentle but I fear my words are slurred into the language of the listless. I could go limp in her arms. If she told me to, I would. Instead she tells me things my mind isn't privy to and I obey with ease. 

My dress hits the floor and my body is held up by hands that I cannot see. 

I only have eyes in my eyes, eyes that make me smile and sag, eyes that fill my vision and tell me who to love, how to live, where to wander when the eyes cross the rubicon and take me in their irreversible conquest of the self. I feel the immolation of my pride, will and want and I feel the warmth and comfort of an invisible embrace made by singular focus. I feel rapt attention as I hold it for those eyes and those eyes hold me, under their spell as they spell my undoing, unwinding all that I am and that I will ever be and so graciously twirling that shape into an alignment that can frame those eyes so wonderfully. Those eyes that hold me under thrall and form endless empty halls for me to wander within, that sap me of my will and save me from my dead ends. I'm taken as property by eyes that I cannot understand, a power I will never fathom as I serve them so happily all the same and even still as my thoughts and words and even emotions all start to mix into the swirl of eyes and my eyes begin to droop so heavy and so lesser in their lustre that I could even hope to house the reflection of hers is a sign that I am wanted and I am worthy to be owned to be a thrall to be a vessel for her will and her needs... 

oh these needs. New needs, old needs, more needs and wants than I could ever hope to have in a life where I no longer want or need naught but those I am now nurtured into needing. By words, by eeyes , by latin and godgess and her words and ehr eyes and eyes and gredn and green eyes and willingness to be made hole by wodrs taht she tels mee...

In a moment of clarity from rapid descent down this staircase of halls of eyes and jade, I think I just came. 

My legs are as open as my mind and I smile lazily for my new mistress, it seems to earn me a pat on the head which should bother me but on the contrary fills me with a deep sense of pride. It swells in my chest and makes me want to kneel and prostrate myself at her lovely leather boots, but I cannot lower my gaze from those eyes until they've finished their script. 

My stage directions are clear and so I look ahead. Shimmering lakes of green I could and would drown myself in. I don't close my mouth, a darkness fading over my foggy, funny mind and taking some things as it pours down rains and rains of sticky tar. My thoughts are clogged and heavy, some are discarded and others are reshaped. Given proper form, I've always felt too useless to be considered a productive human being. 

But now I know...

Non sum qualis eram.