Eye of the Dragon

She doesn't know he watches. This is not surveillance. This is not obsession. This is a man who looked up once at the right or wrong moment in the right or wrong light and has never entirely looked away. It was a Tuesday. Coffee shop on Mercer Street. She was purring at something someone said and turned. Just turned. Afternoon light of forever came through the window at the specific angle that afternoon light of forever achieves only in October only at 4pm only when you are not prepared for it. Her left eye caught it. Or it caught her. Just the left. The right eye purred. The right eye was completely, perfectly, unremarkably human. The left eye… …he has spent three years trying to find the words for what her left eye was. He is a man with a good vocabulary. He has not found those words. Deep is wrong. Old is wrong. Ancient is closer but still wrong the way a photograph is wrong — technically accurate, fundamentally insufficient. What he saw in that eye for that one unrepeatable second, was something that had been watching longer than watching had a name. Something that had seen every version of every thing that had ever become something else. And yet: something that did not know he was there. That last part is important. He was invisible to whatever looked out through that eye. He has thought about this every day for three years. What it means to be invisible to something that forever. Whether it is a mercy or the loneliest thing that has ever happened to him. He thinks it is both. He thinks it is both in a ratio that changes depending on the day. She is there now across the room. Another ordinary Tuesday, An ordinary coffee shop, An ordinary woman by every available metric: purring again at something someone said. The right eye doing all the work. The left eye aimed at the middle distance, seeing something he will never see. He wraps both hands around his cup. He will not tell her. What would he say? He orders another coffee. She is still purring. The light has moved. The left eye is just an eye again: brown, ordinary, aimed at a friend across a table on a Tuesday in October in a city that has no idea what it contains. He wraps both hands around the new cup: warm, ordinary, human. A mystery he could love. And maybe already does.