The Eye That Refused the Dark: A Story of Love, Loss, and Inner Sight by Selahmon Jones

Photo by Selahmon Risingsun. Photo graphic design by Epifania Arriagada

Last night,
a song slipped into my sleep.
Something like stay,
something like stand beside me
when the veil thins.

Not the old hymn everyone knows.
No.
This one felt older.
Like smoke curling through a covenant.

In the dream,
I was holding someone’s hand.

Not clutching.
Not begging.
Just holding
the way priestesses hold flame
when the wind begins to argue.

Someone was leaving.
Or maybe I was.
Or maybe it was time itself
loosening its shawl.

I woke with salt on my mouth
and searched for the song
as if it were a prophecy
I had misplaced.

And tell me,
why have I always been this way?
Trying to name the omen
before it finishes unfolding.

—

Ever since I was a little girl
with one good eye
and one swallowed by shadow,
I have known.

I was marked.

Not cursed.
Not broken.
Marked.

There are nights
when I close my seeing eye
and enter the other one,
the dark one.

It feels like a corridor
with a child inside it
pressing her palms
against the walls of my ribs,
trying to look out.

It is pitch black in there.
And yet she is not afraid.

She waits.

Sometimes I think
that is the real me.
The small, furious spark
inside the cavern of my body,
whispering,
You were not born to dim.

I have always felt
like thunder looking for a sky.
Like the world was already seated
and my spirit was backstage,
stretching its voice.

I was never meant
to be hidden furniture
in someone else’s unfinished house.

—

But I wanted love.

I wanted love
like witches want fire.
Not to destroy,
but to gather around.

Not for protection.
Not for rescue.
For belonging.
For tribe.

For someone whose bones
recognize mine
without translation.

Maybe it began
with a father who was present in body
but absent in pulse.
A silhouette in the doorway.
A quiet room inside a loud house.

So I grew up
building altars out of men
who felt like shelter.

One almost wore the title of husband.
Twice we stood at the mouth of forever.
Twice rings vanished
like offerings swallowed by careless gods.

I told myself loyalty was strength.
I told myself staying was noble.

But grief is not glue.
And guilt is not holy.

If a man is married to the bottle,
he cannot wed my future.

Let me be honest,
raw as bone:

If my one good eye ever dims,
if darkness comes hunting again,
I need more than a warm body
and memories.

I need a warrior.
A witness.
A steady flame.

Love that cannot hold you upright
is not love.

It is nostalgia dressed in perfume.

And I have inhaled enough illusions.

—

There is a fear I rarely confess.

It arrives in quiet hours.

What if the darkness wins?
What if the child inside my hollow eye
is the only one left watching?
What if I grow old
with only my own shadow
checking on me?

I do not want to become
an echo in my own house.

I do not want solitude
to be my inheritance.

I have seen what that looks like.
Two parents aging
with no one to lay a hand
on their loneliness.

I refuse that prophecy.

Not out of desperation,
but out of defiance.

I do not want a partner for safety.
I want one for sacred alignment.

For that ancient, tribal knowing.
The kind where if I falter,
you feel it in your marrow
and arrive without being summoned.

I want a love
that stands beside me
when I am magnificent
and when I am monstrous.

When the light crowns me
and when the dark tries to reclaim me.

—

So if I must clear the circle
to call in something stronger,
then let the old spirits scatter.

If I must grieve
what almost was,
let me grieve without apology.

But I will not
shrink my magic
to keep a man comfortable.

I was not born
to babysit potential.

I was born
to be seen.

Even with one eye.
Especially with one eye.

Because the one that remains
sees in ways the other never could.

It sees through excuses.
Through half love.
Through almost.

And somewhere,
beyond the smoke,
beyond the failed rings,
beyond the old grief,
there is a hand
that will take mine.

Not because someone is leaving.
Not because someone is dying.
Not because time is running out.

But because we are choosing
each other
in full light
and full shadow.

And this time,
when the song rises,
it will not ask me to stay in fear.

It will say,
Stand.

And I will.

Unblinded.
Unapologetic.

The eye that refused the dark.