He had written about love before.
He had written about the kind that came like summer rain, unexpected and welcome.
About the kind that left without closing the doors.
About the kind that stayed long enough to become furniture, familiar and unnoticed until the day it was gone.
He had written poems for women whose names he could no longer remember and stories about those he had never met.
He had written love so convincing people mistook him for an expert.
He was not.
Then she came with those brown eyes of hers and the poor man could not
write a single word.
It was embarrassing, really.
He had a notebook full of unfinished thoughts, a coffee gone cold next to him, and a woman who had done absolutely nothing extraordinary except look at him while he was speaking.
He forgot what he was saying.
He tried to recover the sentence, found it stuck somewhere between his stomach and throat and abandoned it altogether.
“Sorry.” he said. “What was I talking about?”
She smiled “I have no idea.”
And there it was, that smile.
He would spend the next several months trying to describe it and fail in elaborate ways.
But the real problem though were her eyes.
Brown was such an unremarkable word for it.
Somethimes, in sunlight, they turned the colour of honey.
Indoors, they were so dark like the night sky he swore he saw the galaxy in them.
And sometimes when she looked at him in that peculiar seriousness she reserved for things that mattered, he felt as if the world had excused itself from the room.
He hated how it made him feel.
He had spent years looking at his own feelings from a safe distance that he could dissect an emotion before it happened, he could attribute attraction to some psychological pattern and explain heartbreak like a scholar.
But he could not explain her.
He could tell you why he was attracted to her. He could list her qualities, catalog her habits and identify the exact moment his affection had overwhelmed him.
None of that explained why he remembered the way she pronounced certain words or why he caught himself smiling at something she had said three days earlier or why when something happened his first instinct was to tell her.
Why her absence made an ordinary present afternoon feel like somebody had removed its colors.
He tried writing about her, naturally.
The first attempt began with her, eyes.
He crossed it out.
The second compared her to the Moon.
He crossed that out too, the moon had suffered enough at the hands of poets.
The third began with a confession about a man who had spent an entire life learning words but still be stumbled by a look.
He kept that one, it was not particularly good but it was true.
And the truth, he began to understand was sometimes the best a writer could manage.
One evening she asked what he was working on.
“A story.”
“About someone you know?” her eyes had curiosity in them.
“Unfortunately.”
She laughed.
He loved that laugh. Not in a way a man would declare he would cross oceans for it.
He loved it for the small inconvenient way that made him want to say ridiculous things just to hear it again.
“Am I allowed to read it? She asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“it is unfinished.”
“That has never stopped you from having an opinion about my cooking.”
“Your cooking is a health hazard.”
She threw a cushion at him.
He caught it.
For a moment, they were simply two people sitting together, laughing over nothing important.
He wanted to preserve that moment somewhere as it was.
Not in a photograph; that could not preserve the exact warmth of the room, or the feeling of being somewhere you wanted to stay.
Unremarkable, unrepeatable but alive.
Later that night, he opened his book.
He wrote her name.
Then, beneath it, he wrote:
Brown eyed hallelujah.
He started at the words for a long time..
He was not religious but he understood the impulse behind prayer.
He held the pen tight, and thought about all the things he wanted to tell her and all the reasons he had found not to.
He was afraid, of course.
For writers were excellent at inventing endings before the story had even begun.
He could already imagine the misunderstandings, the distance, and the inevitable day when when her eyes would not look at him the same way again.
His mind constructed an entire tragedy from a deleted reply.
But he was tired of living inside stories that had never happened.
So he turned to a fresh page.
For once he did not begin with her eyes.
He began with himself.
I do not know what you will become in my life.
I do not know if this will grow into something neither of us know how to name yet.
I do not know if I ever find the right words to describe what happens to me when I am next to you.
He closed the notebook.
Tomorrow morning, he would reread it and find a dozen things wrong with it.
He will replace words, rearrange sentences, and question himself if it was all embarrassingly cringy.
Somewhere across town, a brown eyed girl was sleeping, unaware she was the subject of a hundred unfinished thoughts and sentences of a writer smiling at his page.
He had spent years believing if he could name a feeling, he could contain it.
Now he wondered if some existed just to prove him that he could not.
He picked up his pen.
He crossed out Hallelujah and replaced it with Hosanna.