Hard and distant your pale eyes seem to me

As they glitter greenly in the fluorescent light.

The white walls of this asylum

In which we live our lives

Fail to contain the vast space between my heart and yours,

The millennium of miles reflected in your eyes.

Those eyes –

“So close, but yet so far,” the cliché reverberates through my head

As we stand,

Close enough to touch,

But so far apart I can barely make you out

On the distant horizon.

I would go that distance in your eyes,

But I know that I cannot;

My ties to this place are still too strong.

And even if I followed you,

Followed you so far from home,

I don’t know anymore what you would be in that place.

I have seen you while light beamed from every pore,

And also, then, while darkness surged frothily in your soul.

In that place, what are you?

Will you even be there?

Or is there just another stop

On the imaginary journey

Across a thousand worlds to get to you?

If I fight my way past even that,

Will I come to the end to find you died long ago?

+++

Or, worse, that you never even existed

Except within my mind?