#distant eyes

[mypinholepinups]

[thecreaminhiscoffee-archive]

Distant Eyes

There are moments and then there are moments.

She might have known to stop the moment the black first crept in at the edges of her vision, or the moment when she bit words behind carefully clenched teeth, or the moment when the doctor's jaw tightened like it did before she said something she regretted, but it isn't until the moment that she reaches out to touch the other's wrist and Alana flinches away that she realizes this isn't a moment but a moment.

Her fingers curl away, elbow slacking a little as she pulled back.  There's this roaring of black in the back of her head mixed with a red-hot that is slowly cooling, replaced with something like the periwinkle that is and has always been Alana's color.  It cools the black, twists it into a steel gray, and she takes a step back, lips pressing together, hands placed uneasily in the back pockets of her jeans as she turns away.

Alana is saying something as she leaves the room and heads down the stairs; it sounds like an apology - or perhaps she simply knows that she would if she could get words out right now.  But she, too, is encompassed in that draping of black mingling with a harsher, colder gray - funny, how the lighter color is the harsh one - and so maybe she isn't speaking at all and Jessica is just imagining it.  It's not hard - sometimes it feels like every other sentence through the doctor's mouth is an apology - and at the thought of that, one of Jessica's hands leaves her pocket, pushes through her red hair, nails scratching along the top of her head.

It's an empty promise, she thinks to herself as her bare feet touch hardwood floors, to pretend that any of what I'm doing helps.

That's a lie.  She knows that's a lie. She can feel it curving into the dark chambers of her heart and trying to make it her truth, but it won't.  It can't.

It's sitting on the piano bench that maybe she lets herself sigh, relax, all this gray and black and periwinkle balling at her fingertips where she can perhaps project it somewhere else.  Fingers to keys and mind somewhere else entirely, that is always the way of it, the way she remembers to breathe.

She is lucky, perhaps, that there is a piano here, that Alana has such a beautiful piano, as she left her little broken down keyboard in Haruko's apartment when she was evicted.  There are only so many things one can take in situations like that, and although she was able to escape with her father's coat and her mother's guitar, the keyboard....  She hopes someone else took it but, in all honesty, it is probably somewhere in a pile of trash, where it should have been before she picked it up.

Then again, even without a piano, Jessica still has her mother's guitar.  Sometimes she thinks its ability to relax her is even more than that of black and white keys beneath her far too long fingers, simply because sometimes she can pretend to hear her mother singing softly in her ears.  It's really the only time she can remember her, other than this vague image of auburn curls not quite unlike her doctor's, excepting the color.

The thing about playing a song from memory is the ability to let the mind wander, and Jessica's mind does wander, unable to sit still in this one place.  If her eyes are closed, that is well and good, and if she misses a key and snaps herself out of her reverie to fix it fix the broken thing that sound is wrong - well, that last happens more often than she'd like to admit.  There's this sort of frantic panic and frustration quietly quelled by the simple action of returning to the way the song was meant to be played.

And maybe it is in one of those moments somewhere with her eyes closed and her thoughts thrown in the air that she catches the slight creaking of the bench, the additional weight just there on the edge, and she opens her eyes, turns her head just so, watching the tiny doctor watch her.  She doesn't shake her head and she doesn't smile, stays in that moment of the song, but notes the way the other's hands are tight at the edge of her dress, fingers curled under and picking at the loose threads just there.  There's this awkwardness in the silence between the notes, and she tries to ignore that but can't keep from hearing it.  When she stops, that sound is all she can hear, hands retreating from keys they so desperately want to keep pressing.

                         "I'm sorry."

And Jessica surprises herself by saying it first, by breaking the silence with words that she means but perhaps not in the way that she should mean them.  She glances up then, away from the keys, lets herself focus on Alana, dark blue eyes meeting the much brighter ones, and there's this weary sort of smile - the kind she'd perfected not here but in apologizing to Haruko, which felt too much like apologizing to her stepmother for her tastes - the kind where she tries to forget that she's doing it, tries to feel natural, but can't quite.

If she stays like this too long, Alana will apologize.  She knows this.  She does not want this.  This one was her fault, entirely her fault, and she doesn't want to fight again over how much the other woman should not be apologizing for herself.

                         "I was out of line, I shouldn't have brought it up, I--"

She is twenty-nine and for all of her jokes she is still young and she is curling into herself because as much as she knows that Alana doesn't want her to leave she sometimes forgets that she, too, has been left and she, too, knows what it's like to be abandoned and there's this fear like champagne gripping her heart and if she's reaching for herself when she reaches out to touch Alana's wrist again, then allow her this one moment of selfishness.

This time the other does not flinch away and, if given a few moments' time, there is this exhaustion that leans her against the redhead - there is always exhaustion after a fight because there is always fear after a fight - and when she holds her closer and runs a hand through the dark curls and presses a gentle kiss to the thin scar on her forehead, it is this constant murmur of we are fine we are fine we are--

[shitredditrocks]

Revenant - Distant Eyes

"Distant Eyes" by Revenant

posted in r/metal

[sailorenna]

2012.... has really two years gone by since since i got suddenly sucked into this series

[sailorenna]

u don't know the horrors of tumblr until you accidentally get a popular post

[finaleyes]

Distant Eyes

It’s hard to get my point across this way. When my talents and interests are never really focused and my thoughts are in Technicolor, consisting of different shapes. The world is just easier to see through a lens. Focus, zoom, adjust and snap. It’s mine. Just don’t forget the rule of thirds. Don’t forget the detail or the beauty in the broken down. The curve of his ragged jaw or the wrinkles in her elbow. Conversational coffee, sitting around musical chairs. They mean something to us but too many people are asking “what?” Appreciate it anyway. An unrelenting grin that jumps up and cheers, Without warning, for only my own shifty, shy eyes. A responsive smile, also unanticipated, stretched across my face. From ear to ear, held in place, with no effort of my own, And this moment is who I will love today. Short conversations with a boy in the room, across from me, a desk in between. Wires and lights and other devices, Providing that blinding, blinking distraction. Maybe all of this is enough, Because I’ll love this on Monday. Walking to, in, from, out You’re always around. Distant eyes because of the constant 10 foot proximity But I can still feel the clicking in your brain, Through my skin, up my spine, and in my own mind. Your expression talks to me everyday So why would you need to take that place. The place next to me, take a sit. All of you, take the sit. It’s you I want to love today.