32 Days of Christmas: Day 14
The first day she sent me a video note on WhatsApp I was mesmerized by her hazel eyes. To say they are beautiful in the reflection of the setting sun would be degrading to her beauty. I’ve literally never seen anything like them. I always imagine they’d be terrifying when mad, so I always try my best to stay on her good side. They carry a quiet danger that lures you in. Even if you’re fearless, you find yourself willing to risk unraveling a part of you that you never knew was stitched so tightly. With every blink she knocks me slightly off balance, the soft sweep of her lashes makes it impossible to look away.
In terrible times when I started feeling like a tertiary figure in her life it felt like I’d been placed there by forces I didn’t comprehend, and definitely didn’t like. Fighting an invisible villain is hard, and irritating—especially when you realize the villain might be time, or fear, or the version of yourself you’re becoming around her. And yet, even in that confusion, she always her way of pulling me back into her orbit with the smallest things. Like folding her hair up. Or baking me a cake.
When she told me the colour of my eyes I couldn’t stop staring at hers instead. To see my reflection in them and wish we could exchange worlds, just to understand how beautiful eyes see the world.
“You have your father’s eyes, but your mother’s soul,” she said.
We laugh the loudest in crowded malls, the kind of laughter that bounces off glass storefronts and makes strangers turn. We tumble through cinema hallways with sugary popcorn we never finish, compete at bowling like champions in big goofy shoes, stumbling into each other more than into the pins. Our memories braid themselves together so tightly that recalling one means tugging on the other. She has always mocked my soft hands—how they’ve never lifted anything heavier than a suitcase, while hers carry scars and the ghost of years spent on farms, softened only by years of applying lotions. Yet those differences never scar us; they stitch us together. Two mismatched worlds that met and made something gentler, stronger, and impossibly whole.
✍🏽Reagan.