blue. (ii)

this will be short. i'm tired, and i need to sleep, and i'm getting up in about 5 hours.

this is about the song, firefly (faye wong). great song. in chinese, though, so be sure to get the translated lyrics. it's worth it. the song is good; the lyrics make it great.

this is about this line, to be precise:

by day you don't even see me/but by night there is only you and i

you kinda need to read it in context of the rest of the song, so i'll tack the entirety of the lyrics to the end.

is it just me, or that an incredibly evocative line? i know, i associate all the songs i love with 1) sex or 2) tragedy. but there's already been an entry on why that is, and the link between sex tragedy emotion and music.

no need to go over old topics.

but come on now. by day you don't even see me. by night there is only you and i.

fucking sad! i can't explain it, but i'm sure you know what i mean. and so...imageristic. haha, i made a new word. but like, listening to it, i can almost see it: daytime, busy-ness, big city, skyscrapers, two people; somehow related, see each other often...casual lovers, or so the guy thinks, never for a moment imagining it could be more (or maybe knowing it, but ignoring it) - the way their eyes don't ever really meet; the way her eyes seek his out, but his gloss right over her like she wasn't even there, moving on to smile at someone else.

then, night: light's gone, no moon, no stars. inside, bedroom, everything's pitch black, utterly black, and all there is, is silence and ragged/languorous....fuck i can't spell that word - you know what i mean - breathing; touching, skin on skin, and the brief green flares of light behind the eyelids sparked by the caress of a lover. nothing else in all the world. and in those moments he knows she loves him, and he knows he loves her, too, but what does it matter? the sun comes up; he forgets.

by day you don't even see me, she tells him, but he doesn't hear it. by night, there is only you and i.

ag! i can't put it into words.

another subject, just something i want to jot down before i forget again. there was a girl in my third-grade class who sat next to me a lot. in retrospect, a startlingly pretty little girl. blonde hair, slender and small...blue eyes. that's the key - her blue eyes, which were the bluest eyes i have ever seen before or after.

her name was vanessa. i shouldn't forget that.

i've spoken of the winter sky here in the bay before, i think - that's the only blue i can compare it to, though the two shades are nothing alike. hers were a deeper blue, and clearer; the sky is a hard-edged, flat/deep thing, without facets - or the whole thing is a facet too big to see the edges of. her eyes weren't like that. i know i've read it somewhere, limpid blue pools for eyes, and it's so stupid and cliche, but that's exactly how her eyes were. unbelievable, the color. even now i can close my eyes and seen them in perfect clarity (blue - not electric, not shocking - just...so vibrant, clear, but dark too, and with a large dark pupil, threads of dark interlaced among the deep, rich, full, bright hue; god, it's hard to describe), though i've forgotten the details of her face.

it's easy to blow this out of proportion. it's so easy to call her my first crush. it'd be so much more dramatic and bittersweet. but i have to be honest and say she wasn't. she didn't like me much, and i didn't particularly care about her, i don't think. it's easy for me to wax poetic on the hue of her eyes, too, but that's only because i can't put it into words, so i use a vast abundance to try to make up for it.

i'll say this much, and this will be the last on the subject of the color itself: SURREAL.

so anyway, one day, i was sitting next to her - i remember this clearly - on the floor, while our teacher, Ms. Redling, was teaching us something, or reading a story, or something. that doesn't matter much. i wasn't listening anyway.

i was looking at her eyes. god knows why. this was before puppy love, btw, so i had a healthy contempt of girls, and while i think i did understand that her eyes were beautiful, it didn't really matter. she was still a girl (ew, gross), etc...but still, i was looking at her, at her eyes.

and all of a sudden, i had this thought: so that's what blue eyes are really like. it wasn't profound, and it wasn't melodramatic. bells didn't ring in my head. it wasn't an epiphany. it was very natural, just a passing thought i happen to remember. i, very simply, honestly thought that i had never really seen blue eyes before after all. i honestly thought i had been fooled all along, and had suddenly discovered what blue eyes were REALLY like, and all that i had thought were blue before that was just another shade of gray, duller, not as real.

i thought the shade of her eyes defined blueness. there was never a doubt in my mind; her eyes were the real deal. blue. all else that had come before was only a very paltry imitation.