I will not hold your eyes.

I know that you only offer me your gaze so that you can have mine. Your attention is a gift. Alms to the poor so the poor can pay taxes. A gesture of interest that masks the insistence – entitlement – ignorance – that a weird girl like me should be grateful for. Instead, I play with my loop earplugs and keep my eyes down while your tiktok small talk crawls across my skin. I’m just trying to get coffee.

You ask for a name, a snapchat, a number – assume that I have one. I do and

It’s 2

but you don’t find that funny – ask why I’m rude and won’t hold your eyes, so I tell you.

I tell you

I will not hold your eyes because I know what they will do to me. The last time – the first time – the every time I give way to the pressing of eyes, they get inside me. Tight like a fist in my throat, they slip and they drop – dull thud after thud in the pit of my stomach. They roll. Blood and jelly squirms, optic nerves tickling like the tail of a rat or a ratless tail. Like worms.

You don’t like this. Take a step back. But you asked so I answer

Thin little worms. Pink and gummy. The kind that, if you pulled them, they would tear in the middle. And the eyes – they would breed and lay little eggs like a snail, and bloat and then die; and the newborn extensions of you would make their home inside me. And mine inside you because this goes both ways, you see. Do you see yet? Despite that shake of your head. Your eyes would think they have a right to me. Red flags at the ready, they’d claim me. Conquer me. Puppet my legs to the cab that you offered to catch with me. Write your name in silver trails over every inch of me, and even when, in the morning, you’d try to leave me, I would never get you out.

So I ask

Are you ready?

And I take a deep breath. And look up. And your eyes are nowhere to be found.

I am alone with my coffee.