Blue Velvet

Sunlight slanted through the checkerboard windows that covered the wall behind me, the early morning light bouncing dully off of the slate stone surface of the blackboard on the far wall, as if it had encountered a perfectly flat veneer of windswept sand, pressed and compacted into a smooth sheet, simultaneously reflecting a million individual grains and glowing as if the surface was one, clast-less whole.

She sat to my left, the light illuminating half of her face while the other half was clouded in the half-darkness of the room, her features a peaceful contrast of night and day, half her hair an explosion of golden satin, the other half a mysterious, moon-chilled blossom of deep hazel.

She looked up at me, one eye twinkling like a distant star, the other foggy like an early morning, deep within a frosty wood.

"What are you staring at?" She asked, her voice cutting through a seemingly unbreakable silence that clung to the world like a set clothes which, after being stuck in a midday shower, grip their wearer like a constrictor.

"Blue velvet," I responded.

She looked at me questioningly.

"I'm not sure how to describe it..." I whispered, as if I was afraid that speaking too loudly would send the vibrant image scurrying for cover. "Come look."

She stood silently and tip-toed over to me, as if she were floating, her feet sliding just above the creamy tiled floor, like a specter of the sun, like a ghost of the moon. She peered over my shoulder, inspecting my glasses frame through which I was gazing so intently.

She gasped.

"Blue velvet..." she sighed.

Reflected in the lens of my glasses, was my own face, except colored in the most vibrant, ultraviolet blue. The hairs on my cheeks stood up, like lightning rods, reflecting  the sloping sunbeams like silky strobe lights, each tiny movement sending a shimmer of light up their lengths, as if they were a million tiny radar antennae, sending a million tiny messages to the universe. My eyelashes glittered like a crystal lattice, and every time I blinked, they would scintillate, as if I had shone a powerful neon laser through blue glacial ice which had cracked and shattered like a broken mirror, the flashes simultaneously blinding and captivating. And in the very center of the image, my left eye, the stroma in my iris no longer appearing as a soft hazel, but a florescent velour which seemed to sparkle like light shining at an oblique angle on compacted snow, almost reminiscent of the tiny, lucent eyes of a fly. It seemed to suck the color from the rest of the world, as if nothing else existed, or had ever existed for that matter, but that single, incandescent, ebullient, blue velvet eye.

And we sat, watching my eyelashes flutter, watching my eye sway languidly from side to side, a whole world within a world, a parallel universe that lived within the grains and contours of the image of my visage.

Finally, after what had felt like an eon of staring into my ultraviolet eye, which stared back at me with the intensity of a supermassive star, day turned to night, and my image disappeared, like a mirage that had never been there in the first place, like a whiff of smoke that swirled in the darkening sky before disappearing into nothingness.

I turned to face her.

She had become a moonflower, no longer half night, half day, enveloped fully by the twilight and the ever-darkening sky, accepted and loved by the lunar world above, a child of the stars.

"I almost didn't see it," I commented.

"Aren't those the most beautiful, perfect moments? The ones that we almost miss?" She asked.

"I think they are."