Ocean Eyes

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I once knew a boy who eyes like the ocean, like the sea, like nothing I had never seen,
And I could not help but crave him, in every sense of the word.
So when he sat beside me once at a party,
Where I lingered next to drunken fools who locked lips and grabbed hips,
I could not help but grow flustered and shy.
I remember how I laughed when he asked me if I was “quite alright”,
Because glancing into his eyes, I was certainly a mile more than “quite alright”,
When he looked at me, I felt a jolt reset my heart’s circuits, until it was beating along to his breathing,
And when he touched me, there was static flowing from his fingertips, sending a tingling along my skin.
There was something about the nonchalant way he could take over a room
With his broad shoulders and bold stare,
That left me longing to discover the depths of his ocean eyes… So I dove right in.

I took him in like heroin, injections of saltwater and beach sand filling my veins
Until I couldn’t process anything but the inexplicable high I received from my submergence in his irises.
I loved him in the most sickeningly submissive kind of way, he just never really cared.

I won’t lie, sometimes things were good.
Some nights we would lay in bed, talking about forever
While I wrote soft soliloquies of my love upon his skin.
In those nights, my hands were permitted to trace the lines of his face,
Until I could identify him solely by the feeling of stubble on cheeks.
But most nights were nothing like this.

Most nights were nights where my bones were cracked like my trust in humanity.
Nights where the line between anger and insanity ended up so blurred by his drunken rage,
That I don’t think he could pass a sobriety test by walking along its pin straight path to hell.
Nights where he would kick me out of his pickup truck at my doorstep,
My body bathed in bruises and beliefs that he was able to change.
Nights where he tried to force me, who was years too young and years too wise,
To slip beneath his sheets and feel the fires of lustful desires,
Which only scorched my skin with an immutable sorrow.

I knew that what I felt was a deadly kind of dependency.
But god damn, there was something about that boy
And his sapphire eyes, that made me need him more.

But now I see.
Within his oceanic eyes, he locked the souls of every girl who swam too deep.
He hoards the virginities, and sanities, and dreams, of all those who ever dared to adore him.

He has taken more of me than I had ever planned to give,
But I refuse to leave myself within his seas of stolen souls.
Because now I’ve written a million poems about the boy with the ocean eyes,
And I pray to God that this one will be the last.
For he is the toxic kind of beauty, one that’s poison to even admire from afar;
And I need to find my way out of his labyrinth of lost lovers,
Before I simply become one of the many pigments that form his dazzling gaze.
I am more than that.
So, this is my final goodbye, to the boy with ocean eyes.

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