Green Eyes

Story By StormDancer

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He had always known that the girl he would end up with would have green eyes. He knew it in the same way he knew his name was Darren, or that the sun would rise in the east. It was one of the indubitable truths of the universe, for him at least.

He wasn’t quite sure where the belief had begun. Well, no, he knew, but he didn’t know why it had stuck with him when other memories of the old, wizened Arab woman who had been his grandmother had faded and left this one fact behind. It stayed long after he could barely recall what she looked like or anything else she had said, but that one afternoon years ago had stuck with him long past petty details.

“Child,” she had called in her heavy accent, one afternoon as she had been babysitting for him, or at least professing to. He had been watching TV while she had sat and stared out the window, rocking in her chair. “Child, come here.”

He had trotted over like the obedient child she had always been able to inspire in him when he would scream at his parents or sister. She had leaned down to look into his face.

“Boy, do you know who your wife will be yet?” she had asked. He had answered with all the innocence only an 8 year-old can muster.

“I dunno,” he had shrugged, because then girls were low on his list of priorities, and all he wanted to do was go over to Mia’s but he couldn’t because Grandma wouldn’t drive him, “I guess I’ll know her when I see her.”

The old woman had laughed her high, reedy laugh. If Darren had heard his comment now, he would have joined in, but the naiveté of childhood had made him offended.

“I will!” he had insisted, stamping his foot impatiently, “She’ll have green eyes.”

He had just pulled that out of the air, as a way to stop Grandma from annoying him so he could go back to the TV. That hadn’t been the moment that the unshakable conviction had filled him. But then she leaned down to meet his amber eyes with her own, and she had smiled a smile that was nothing like her usual grin. This was smaller, enigmatic, and as he watched her eyes glazed slightly and something in them glowed with a light he had never seen before.

“Yes,” she had agreed in a low, raspy voice, full of a seriousness he had never in all his 8 years had heard before, “Her eyes will be green.”

The conversation had been pushed to the back of his mind at the time as he scampered back to his TV, away from all thoughts of the future. He hadn’t really remembered it for years, not until girls stopped having cooties and he began to see them with new eyes.

But then the memory came back full force, and he began to have a preternatural awareness for girls with green eyes. Not that he only dated green-eyed girls, in fact, he dated less of them. Mia, his best friend since child-hood, had always teased him about it, because of course he had told her about the old prophecy.

“You’re so afraid of commitment you’ll stay away from green at all costs,” she had teased, glasses veiling laughing eyes. He would scowl at her, or chuck a pillow at her in retaliation, and she would let it go. It didn’t matter, then, because it was just some stupid superstition and he was a rational child of the information age. He didn’t believe in foresight.

And so he went off to college with a head full of learning and not much else. Mia followed him to Boston, but not to his college. It didn’t matter much to him, though; he was free at last, free from his old self and ready to live his life to the fullest. And to search for the elusive green eyes that were always just out of reach.

Until he met Kori. The girl with pale, blue-green eyes that had sucked him to her the moment he had seen her; that had drawn him into her racing, dangerous life. Then it seemed he had found the green eyes, and he had reveled in the feeling of loving and being loved in return. Mia had disappeared, replaced by Kori’s dashing friends. And Kori herself, always smiling, watered green eyes always looking ahead for the next joke or the next adventure. The heady rush of her sort of life, novelty incarnate when compared to his usual cautious style, drowned out all the misgiving s that were sometimes yelled in his grandmother’s voice (she was dead for a decade now) and sometimes whispered by a disappointed Mia’s shade, as for all he knew that was all she was now.

But then it had happened, one golden day in the amber late afternoon sun. Kori, always grasping, always seeking, had sought farther then him.

“I’m sorry,” she had told him with a smile that held no regrets, “But we just aren’t connecting anymore.”

“What?” he had stammered, “I don’t think so. Kor, you’re just tired-”

“No, Darren,” she had replied with a pity that cut deeper then scorn would have, “You know it’s not the same anymore.”

He had known no such thing, had been under the impression that everything between them was as golden as it had ever been. But there was none of the love in her eyes, now bluer then they were green, that there had once been, only a nature doomed to ever search for more then what she had. The place that she had filled was draining, and in its wake he had nothing.

“But,” he pleaded, amber eyes refusing to fill with tears only because of the stubborn streak bequeathed him by his grandmother, “You were my green-eyed girl. You are the one. You have to be!”

And she had smiled without her eyes, and all he could find in that smile was a condescending sympathy, for of course he had confided in her of his grandmother’s prophecy, only the second person he had told, and she had laughed at it like she had laughed at everything else. And now there was only scorn for the poor, deluded boy who believed too much in something ever proved.

“Darren,” she had said with a gentle cruelty that hurt more then anything he had ever known, “Other girls have green eyes.”

And then the part of him that was Kori was gone, and so was he, out of the apartment they had shared, and into the streets in a blind maelstrom of emotions, his feet guiding him unheeded until he arrived on a doorstep long unseen, his hand already raised to knock. But even before he could, the door swung open with the prescience of the best friend, and Mia was standing there, framed by the setting sun.

She toke one look at him, eyes tear-stained by the few drops that had defeated his walls, and drew him into the room without a word of reproach for the months ignored and forgotten. She embraced him with the familiarity that had always been at the root of their relationship, and he finally let himself go and let the tears soak into her auburn hair as she held him and softly murmured words of comfort, for she of course knew what had happened. Mia had always been able to read his mind.

He finally pulled away a bit and looked down at her, opening his mouth to speak, to apologize for how stupid he had been, but then he looked into eyes for once unshielded by glasses, and no words came out, for he was drowning, lost in those pools.

He supposed he had always known academically what colour her eyes were, but it had never really mattered to him. But now, in that moment, nothing mattered more then the eyes gazing up at him with trust and comfort and contentedness in his arms. Not diluted by blue like Kori’s had been, but the pure colour, speckled with a brown that only made their colour stand out more. The ephemeral eyes that had always haunted his dreams made solid, the eyes he knew his grandmother had seen as she stared into this moment and her eyes glazed like his were now.

“Mia,” he murmured as he held her even tighter to him, a new awareness in that embrace that hadn’t been there before but had always been there waiting. And just before his lips touched hers, he breathed in wonder and awe and a sudden knowledge that this was right and that she understood the amazement in his own amber eyes, “Mia, your eyes are green.”