Do His Eyes Recognise His Hands?
Do His Eyes Recognise His Hands?
- Maybe we should just hit each other if communication doesn’t work anymore.
His eyes refuse to meet mine. The boy in front of me avoids my gaze as he fantasises about dragging my cold corpse on the dirty pub floor. I think. I actually don’t know what he imagines doing to me, because he’s too scared to look at me after dropping something that feels like a bomb on us.
His boyish smile doesn’t seem to agree, and his legs that refuse to stop shaking even after he takes a sip of his beer betray him. The boy is nervous; he is scared after his joke. A dark, unfunny, rude, obscene sentence makes him shiver. His eyes that refuse to look at me aren’t mean. They don’t want to hit me, instead they roam around the room, praying to find something distracting enough to avoid my reaction.
What is my reaction?
Ashamed to admit, I start to laugh. I giggle, I make unfunnier counterremarks, and I understand his humour. It is funny after all, considering he had already hit me. I didn’t need to paint the bizarre image of me hitting a boy. This boy. My boy. I didn’t need to imagine it; I had already felt his hands on my body and refused to fight back.
He avoids my face like I used to do with him. Sometimes when I’m alone in my bed, I still feel the warmth of my drool against my cheek like I did that night when he held my face against the mattress. The grey sheets wet from my spit and tears; I can still trace the soaked spot on the fabric I refused to wash for weeks. Sometimes when I’m alone in my bed, I grab the back of my hair and pull on my black curls as hard as I can to remember how he refused to let go. I avoided his eyes that night, too. I must have been scared as well, too frightened that he would recognise my pain in my eyes.
His eyes. The eyes that carelessly look around the room are praying his comment doesn’t turn into another fight. If we can’t communicate, why shouldn’t he hit me again?
Why shouldn’t his hands yearn to dig into my skin again? Leave bruises on my knees and thighs? Paint my arms with his fingerprints as his touch burns me? Slap me in the face and hold me down? If we can’t communicate, then I should let his body talk.
But his eyes, his sly grin, his thick brows and the hundreds of beauty marks don’t want to hit me. They sympathise and they urge me to flee. His boyish face doesn’t fit his tall and scary frame. They don’t match his hands, his fists, his fingers. His hands that hit me don’t look like his soft face. His hands don’t look like his apologies and his tears. They don’t know my secrets or laugh at my jokes. The hands don’t belong to my boy’s eyes.
But sometimes when I’m alone in bed and I stretch my fingers so that my hands are as big and scary as claws, I find that they resemble his and I wonder if his eyes can recognise his hands.
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