On Cyclops

It looked more like the rubber Astroturf baseball field than grass, but not even that. Like a green calico, the clovers helped with that, even though I couldn’t tell such right now. Sam argued that they weren’t clovers, I knew he was right, but it was leafed grass and for it I had no other name. Either way, it wasn’t any sort of grass right now. My eyes widened and head titled forward slightly, it was grass again, individual blades, mostly green but a few yellow/tan poking up from the moist earth. I narrowed my eyes and squinted somewhat, trying to return to the not-grass. It flickered back and forth for a moment, like our old VCR constantly straining to maintain the tracking. Calico, grass, calico, Little House on the Prairie. I blinked. I was thinking too hard. Is that how it works? The harder I try to focus, the more it becomes unfocused? Or am I really trying for the effervescent unfocused view? The more I try to lose focus the more persistent the focused view tries to overtake. Who would try to unfocus anyway? Is withdrawing from a clear view of what is right in front of you so unnatural and even wrong that it becomes a mental and sensory battle to do so?
My mind revolts against submitting to the distortion. Even though the calico comes to blanket my vision so pleasantly and streams back childhood memories curled in front of the fireplace reading Farmer Boy, it is an effort to maintain that. If I let go of all other senses, it stays for a while, but peripheral visions of movement or even sound awaken me from surreality.
Your laughter protrudes into my mind and vision, in the most inoffensive way. Your skin appears glowing with the same reflection of sun that aids in my calico view of what really is just your typical, suburbian, manicured grass. The calico had somehow seemed more natural. But your skin most of all.
When I look into your eyes, our noses pressed into each other. I have to strain, in that same way, to see the cyclops you tell me you see in my face. I usually end up finding two irises in one white, not a true cyclops, but veiled with your quivering eyelashes it is enough to rope me into that same surreality from which I long not to escape. Once your words release and graze soft breath against my lips and cheeks, it is that same awakening, that draws me to focus on your eyes, to find what it is you saying even beyond words. I can see your smile now too. It is the blessedness of a spring morning, of droplets of sun awakening grass from the earth we sit on and beg warmth from. But it isn’t reminiscent calicoes. It isn’t friendly cyclops. It isn’t story land or fairy tale; the unfocused that somehow awakens magic into the focused we must always return to. But it is that focused view, sprinkled still with a shimmer, a splatter of fairy dust, even if we beg and strain again for the flight to Never land. It is the return home, to curtained windows releasing still the evening breeze, to down comforters allowing us to sleep, to familiar arms carrying us beyond even dreams. Into the realities that dreams could never surpass.