In Her Eyes

For NaPoWriMo: Day 4
http://1sojournal.wordpress.com

Staring Into The Future
Digital Painting
by
Elizabeth Crawford

 

In Her Eyes

They were all there inside of her.
Different people, both male and female.

I knew each one, mostly by how
the eyes changed when they ‘came out’.

Cecil, the blind warrior who thought
to hone his other senses by giving
his eyes to another.

Tillie the shy housekeeper who couldn’t
look at anyone straight on because
she’d disappear back inside when she did.

Her twin “I“, who looked down her nose
at me, believing I was a weakness
they couldn’t afford.

And Boy, whose eyes danced with delight
and was a beacon of light in all of their
gathered darkness.

So many others, running from a past, lost
and alone, yet taking pride in their honed
instincts for survival.

I wonder now, if they ever knew it was
their eyes that were the doorway through
which I entered and became their

safe place, their home.

Elizabeth Crawford  4/4/2016

Notes: This is not the poem I intended to write this morning. Something else was emerging while I created the prompt. But afterward, when I sat with the words and music (which she introduced me to), this is what came forward. So I wrote it down. An incest victim who suffered with Multiple Personality Disorder (now defined as DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder), I met her in college, and took her home because she needed a safe place. She lived with me and my two youngest daughters for ten years. It was I, who after a year of living with her, realized their were others, alters, created from trauma who would come out to take her place when she found life too hard to handle. With time and patience, they each came forward to tell me their part of her story. She, and they, taught me more about compassion, caring, and being a good human being than anyone else I have ever met. I doubt she knew it was all there in her eyes.

The image is a digital painting I did several years ago and it has always made me think of Boy and BJ, as only I knew them.