David Policar 1994
I woke with different eyes, looking out upon a world transformed, though somehow unchanged as well. All about me was as it was when I lay down, but different -- somehow less apparent, although no less visible. As if they were words, rather than things, and all at once their language had become to me unfamiliar, so that I could but dimly sense their purpose and meaning, though they remained as clear to my new eyes as ever they had been to my old.
With the eyes of my awakening, I saw wonders writ in the world as well, and here all was inverted -- here, I knew, were commonplace words which until then I had not had the wit to read, or know their sense. Words which had a reflection, to be sure, in the world I saw with my sleeping eyes, but such a pale reflection! ...as of a grand palace seen in the surface of a septic tank. Of these things I could speak -- of love, and spirit, and joy, and peace, and rightness, of harmony and truth and light -- but to speak of them now is but to stir the surface of the muck, and leave the glory untouched.
Of the things I saw with my waking eyes, I shall speak of but one. Beside me stood my love, and there I could see at last that the language writ and read by my eyes of sleep was as the scrawl of an infant, possessed of meaning to those who deal in it, but lacking in any sense; it was as the rhetoric of failed philosophers, dissembling grandly in avoidance of the obvious reality.
How can I describe how I saw her? In truth, I did not see her. Rather, in looking upon her I saw myself revealed, in glorious simplicity and elegant complexity, a work of art and beauty that cannot be imagined, and this I knew to be my own soul revealed to me. I knew this beyond all doubt or modesty, for as those feelings grew within me, I saw them also woven into that tapestry, marring its beauty and distorting its pattern, and in that instant I rebelled against a lifetime's training. I denied doubt, denied fear, denied the lie of false modesty, and looked again upon my soul.
How did she see me? Perhaps I cannot say, but I felt within me her soul as well, a thing of warmth and the smooth softness of silk, the strength of diamond, as perfect a thing as I could ever have hoped to house. And I believe that for that moment she saw herself reflected in me, and knew herself beautiful.
All these things did I see when my eyes were at last opened, and now, as I wait for her eyes to open and her to join me, I write of them.