“New Eyes” Written by Selahmon Risingsun Jones
Image by Selahmon Risingsun Jones. Image edited by Epifania Arriagada
How do I look at you with new eyes
when my old ones
have memorized the shape of your leaving?
How do I meet you
as the person standing before me
when ghosts keep introducing me
to the man you used to be?
I know things about you.
The way silence settles in your chest
when something hurts.
The way you turn distant
when truth gets too close.
The way your laughter can fill a room
and your shadows can empty one.
I know the roads you traveled,
the wounds you carried,
the excuses you wore
like a second skin.
And maybe that's the problem.
Maybe memory is a stained-glass window.
Beautiful.
But it colors everything.
Maybe I have spent so long
looking at you through yesterday
that I cannot see
who arrived today.
Because time has happened to us.
It has carved rivers into our faces,
written hard-earned wisdom into our bones,
turned certainty into questions
and questions into prayer.
We are not the people
who first found each other.
Life has broken us open since then.
Life has buried things.
Life has grown things.
And perhaps friendship—
real friendship—
begins when two people
stop arguing with the past long enough
to introduce themselves again.
And sometimes,
if life is gentle,
if healing is honest,
if two hearts have truly grown,
perhaps a friendship
can become a love story again—
not because it is reaching backward,
but because it is brave enough
to begin anew.
Hello.
Who are you now?
What dreams survived?
What fears stayed?
What parts of you finally learned
how to speak their own name?
And maybe I should ask myself
the same questions.
Because if you deserve new eyes,
so do I.
Maybe that is where healing lives—
not in forgetting,
not in pretending,
not in rewriting history,
but in setting down the old photographs
for one impossible moment
and allowing ourselves
to be strangers again.
Perhaps new eyes
are not eyes at all.
Perhaps they are a spell.
A quiet act of surrender.
A candle lit for the people
we can no longer be.
A blessing whispered over the graves
of old expectations.
A sacred unbinding.
The kind that allows two souls
to step out from the shadows
of who they were
and meet each other
without the weight of unfinished stories.
Not strangers without history.
Strangers with possibility.
Two souls standing
at the edge of what was,
wondering if there is enough grace
left in the world
to see each other
for the first time
twice.
— Selahmon Risingsun
Dedicated to Alonzo—
proof that even memory can change its shape.
