Blue Light

a golden shovel with Big Thief’s "Mythological Beauty”

I stare into an empty space and somehow you
are always there. I am almost forced to see you and I have
no way of getting rid of this, like a
pixie or imp, invasive, curious, bothersome, mythological
Like a fairy, like some kind of animal, only holding less mystery, less beauty.

I can’t seem to get away from you and anything about you
Everything I look at and everyone I see; they all have
something that somehow reminds of the
way you look when I look in your eye.
The curiosity of a knowledge so deep, of
listening and reading, writing someone.
I see it in the way I
sit here and think And the way I have
the wildest recollections of things I might have seen.

If I were to think of you at night, and I’d never say I do, I’d step outside
and drench myself in the cold fog of
the sky, reminding me we are anything but ordinary,
Yet I still manage to find the extraordinary fear hidden in all situations.

I have yet to find a way to make everything fair and even.
I think if it were, you’d follow me outside
and be able to spare me the cold with the warmth of
your presence But it’s only ever fair in my dreams.

Maybe in another, better world, you
would see me as something. Now, I lie
and say I don’t see you in
that empty dark when I’m in bed,
and only when I’m at
a space we both exist in, a real place outside of night.
And every night I think about you but never in dreams and
in the daytime all I can do is watch
you look at me in a sort of way I’ve looked at you a million times, but the
light in your eyes is nothing compared to the tired lines
beneath mine. As if you were an animal, curious of
the yellow borders on the road. As if I were a deer, caught in your headlights
which pierce me all the way through.
I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me, not even through your
mouth, not even through our eyes, not even through a screen.

— Jessie Vanderwall