She walked with eyes that held no light,
but it wasn’t the shadows that hurt me,
it was that her blindness lived deeper,
than her sight.
One eye, and half the other,
yet still she never saw me.
Not the curve of my voice when it softened for her.
Not the shimmer in my gestures
when I tried to make her smile.
Not the name I whispered to myself when no one else would.
She did not see because she would not.
Because to see me would unravel the fiction she chose to keep,
sacred.
She told herself, her god would give her eyes in the afterlife,
while here, she used her veil to cover me with guilt.
And still, I prayed.
Not for her love, but for her to see again.
Even when she punished me with silence,
even when she erased me from her memory,
I asked the stars to give her light.
But not once did she say my name.
Not once did she offer a breath that met me where I am.
And this,
this is the cruelty I can never explain without breaking.
That the one who should have seen beyond the veil,
chose to turn her face toward blindness
and called it faith.
While I stood at the door of her unseeing,
carrying the weight of being invisible
to the eyes that should have known me before
all others.
.
.