The eyes of the abyss

Remembering Caraz Cesui with Anaiss Nomara

Did it happen to you that someone had a huge impact on you with you not really acknowledging it? And when they were gone from your life, you missed them until also that feeling disappeared and then the time passed and you have forgotten everything until one day something small, ridiculous triggers those feelings back in your head and brings that person back in your life.

For about a year now, I remembered him…“the man with the eyes of the abyss”. That’s how I used to call him. And the spark was not coming from a madeleine displaying his eyes, ha ha ha or simply me looking at those eyes, but something he had written. Do you know how many times I had seen those eyes after that period and I haven’t thought of them as abyss? I tried very hard to remember why I used to call him that and what made me stop…because I knew I was never really in love with him and he was not even a close friend. There was something mysterious that was hidden in the boxes of memories of my head, like a story, a fantastic story from a different world. The other day I remembered it again accidentally listening to a song that he also liked. The man with the eyes of the abyss came back for a second knocking at the doors of my soul, leaving a strange heartbeat behind before disappearing into oblivion again. I had to find out who was that man and what he had represented in my life back then.

And believe me, I’ve laughed very hard when I found out from an old notebook containing messages dedicated to him. The man with the eyes of the abyss, not my ex, not my friend, a stranger,… my muse. Yap. You guys, have girls for muses, why can’t we girls have guys? Well, as crazy as it seemed I had a half notebook full of written things dedicated to him, not out of love, well simply because he was my inspiration. It was enough to see him and my mind drifted away opening into a different universe where he was the king of fantasy. Love? I wasn’t actually fantasizing about my love and his, but I still called it love, because I was fascinated by his being, by his soul. 

And all I wanted was his soul. That desire was expressed actually quite poetically at the end of some of the verses or short stories. Now, that made me laugh again so hard that this morning I wanted to ask him if someone before has requested his soul. This sounds so malefic. It still amuses me. “Gimme, your soul! Right now!” Oh, and I also had to stare at his picture for about five minutes to find the abyss that I kept talking about. With a little effort…and a little help from a mysterious girl, I forgot about, Anaiss…let’s see who was or is the man with the eyes of the abyss.

It was during university years and three quarters of the female race had a crush on this tall guy from the Literature department with curly light brown hair and celestial blue eyes, a sensual full mouth, high cheek bones and a romantic air, like Byron and of course, a poet. I still make a face of aversion that after all this time I remember his traits or almost and I try to display them as lyrically as they were seen. What can I say, a beauty? No matter how ironic, I’m trying to be, I have to recognize, he was quite beautiful, he just didn’t appeal to my senses in any way. My friends were hysterical when he was passing by, the female race was falling at his knees and they thronged to see him. I was disgusted. My friends dragged me to the hallway because the beauty king was passing by and they were trying to convince me of his qualities. And while I was barely fitting in a doorway, totally bored and listening to their rattle, I saw him – the man with the eyes of the abyss. A smile appeared on my face as if I had discovered the mystery of the world. 
Those eyes were infinite in blackness, immeasurable, the entire universe fitting in those black eyes, a profound pit, a hole with no bottom, in space and time. I thought for a moment that he smiled back to me, but I probably imagined it or I was wrong, with all that femininity display around me.

“His friend is totally cool,” I mumbled to my friends. “Poet? Look at those black eyes…”

“His friend is our colleague, you idiot!” one of my friends replied to me ignoring the rest of my comment.

Yap, I must have looked like an idiot not to recognize one of my colleagues, but that was the moment when I actually first acknowledged him. And I don’t know if it was his white shirt, and his oily raven hair, or his face, with pretty normal traits, but those eyes touched something so frail in my soul, that I couldn’t stop wondering about them.

Of course, my friends finding out about my new interest, started to give me inputs about him: who he was, what he did, what school he was coming from etc. etc. But I didn’t care, all I wanted was to see his eyes and find out what it was beyond those eyes, what was behind that gate in a different universe. And each time I saw him after that, I discovered a different universe. I was already writing about the countless worlds behind those eyes. I was fascinated, not by the man, but by what he could have been.

One day, when we found out that my cousin had been their classmate, my friends asked him so many questions about the two men that my head hurt. I forgot instantly almost everything I was told. When we were left alone, my cousin looked me in the eyes and asked me the question that I refused to ask myself.

“So, you like him, ah?”

“Like?” the words paused on my lips for long and I didn’t know what to reply. “I don’t know if I can say that I like him…” I replied uncertain. And because I was pounding too long, my cousin continued.

“I don’t want to disappoint you, but I don’t think he is your type and clearly you are not his type.”

And then it clicked.

“No,” I jumped. “I don’t like him. I don’t like him in that way. I don’t know him to like him. I actually don’t care,” I replied laughing. “I just think he is a smart guy that I would like to know a little better or maybe not...I don’t know. I am not interested in him as a man. Leave it... it’s not what you think it is.”

And that where it was left and everybody else decided to leave me alone, with my weird single sided platonic love, if it could be even named that, maybe better phantasmagoric love.

I didn’t care who he was in reality, but the man with the eyes of the abyss was everything else in the universe that I was seeing behind his eyes. He was an immortal wall of time in the building of space, and one little window wanted to be protected, but he couldn’t protect only her from the bad weather, because he was too busy with all the other windows. He had become shriveled and the little window felt pity for him because they were both dirty and forgotten by the human race. In a poem Cleopatra was mourning his death and in another he was the light of the stars in a pitch black night with no name. He was the absence of time and the time itself. He had built himself from the sand of time grain by grain, he had felt love and hate and pain, he had felt joy and shame, he forgave and was forgotten, he blanked out his infinite past choosing to live a simple human life and with each missed memory a grain was dropping from his body. The infinite time was dying unconsciously, forgetting who he was. With each written line, I was reminding him indirectly, knowing that he would never discover that I knew his secret. He was not human, not in my mind…he was the immortal time, the man with the eyes of the abyss.

One day someone had mistaken my rhymes for love, again. In my try to defend myself, I ceased to write, about the “beautiful child with infinite eyes” and I only seen him for what he was in other people's eyes, a merely human being, one of my classmates. But, somewhere in my heart remained that feeling that somewhere in my life, I’ve met, the time itself.