Old Blue Eyes

Illustration by Sydney Hanson

I stand and look in the mirror, the man looking back at me is unfamiliar. The cheeks are skinnier than I remember, the jaw more defined by the stubble that grows on the face. The man in the mirror is not who I remember him to be, he is a stranger. I search his face for familiarity, it is not easy, but it is there, the nose is crooked in the same way mine is and his blue eyes pierce through mine. His eyes are cold, colder than an overcast winter day, when the wind blows through you and the sun is oblivious to your desire for warmth. It is in those eyes that I finally find myself. For as long as I’ve lived those eyes have looked back at me in the mirror, whether they be framed by bags, tears, or bruises they kept their coldness. I wonder what other people see when they look into those eyes. Do they see a vast soul behind them, perhaps they see the same coldness that I see in the mirror, or perhaps, something else entirely. 

There was an old dog, a long time ago, he was a husky, his fur had long been grey and no one had heard his howl for some time. I like to believe that he was once a great sled dog, pulling hunters across the snow covered tundra. I don’t know how true that is, but it is what I choose to believe. I met him in a kennel, I don’t know what brought him there, I never wanted to know. He was there long before I ended up in that kennel with him. He was quiet, he never barked, never howled, he sat, with his piercing eyes he’d watch us come and go. It was through those piercing eyes I grew attached to him, they were the same cold blue eyes that watched me in my mirror. I don’t know if he ever felt the same comradery towards me that I felt towards him but I choose to believe that he did. I choose to believe that we were two poor souls intertwined, each of us pulling our own sleds through our own wastelands. In the end he was a poor dog in a cage and me a poor man in a kennel. If I had the means I would have freed him, taken him to a big farm where he could run free and wild, where he could terrorize the birds and the groundhogs. 

I am not a man of means, in fact I am quite the opposite. Every time I walked into that kennel I was met with his eyes and I wished that I could take him away. In the end, I couldn’t, no one would, no one would foster him, no one would save him. I asked if I could be with him when he went, no one knew why I wanted to be with him, he never got along particularly well with any of us and my request seemed strange to those who knew me, but there was something deep within me that couldn’t let him leave alone. I still remember the ways those eyes looked when they shut for the last time, and it still breaks my heart. 

All he ever wanted was for someone to look into those poor old blue eyes and find something worth saving.