Behind My Hazel Eyes

I grew up in North Texas, just on the tail end of Tornado Valley, and always accustomed to surviving. 

So the storms never scared me, they just were.

I both loved and hated the booming of thunder and loud cracks of lightning. I would practice what they taught me in school, to time the space in between, gauging how close it was to me… and that calculus was comforting. 

It was this small method of controlling the chaos, of making sense of the world that was usually small, at least to me. 

When a storm would come, and the thunder rolled, when I jumped just a little with each crack of electricity that followed – I felt so much more connected to everything I didn’t know. Everything that made me wonder, everything that challenged me, everything that made me feel heard. 

As the storm raged on, and it got closer to me, every other noise seemed to drown out – even the ones in my head. For those seconds, minutes, sometimes hours – It was only us. Me and the storm that was approaching. 

Like twins once separated being pulled together by gravity. Like maybe, if I could make sense of it, I could do the same with myself. 

It was like screaming in silence. Like my soul’s mirror was saying all the words for me. As the thunder broke and lightning crashed, I felt the weight drop from my shoulders, I felt my body relax. 

It was like holding hands in the dark. This sweet remembrance, this intuitive understanding, this thing so much bigger than my small corner of it – telling me that sometimes it’s okay to lose it all, to lose control – that it was only natural. 

That I could be loud and angry and demand to be heard, that I could be destructive and find purpose in it all. That from my pain I could grow – whether flowers or hope. 

That the worst of me didn’t have to be ugly, it could instead be beautiful. 

And as the storm would eventually pass, I learned that it always would. I would step outside into a world soaked in quiet. For others the calm came before, but for me it was in the moments after. 

Where everywhere I looked, all I saw was green. 

All I saw was life persevering. Maybe in spite, but maybe because of it. Like looking through a lens that only showed the happy hidden under the struggling. 

There was never anything I had seen like it, except for the reflection in the mirror after nights of crying. 

Where I saw eyes made of earth, that resembled the complexity of living. Sometimes brown like the dirt below, sometimes green like the plants it helped to grow – and sometimes both. More often than most they were mixed percentages of the two, always existing in perfect harmony the way that nature does – and in that way they were beautiful, and I was too. 

But when I cried, when I let out the feelings inside that seemed like they were going to end me, when I screamed at the top of my lungs with the power of a storm that never asks permission to be heard — they were green. 

That same color, same shade, same feeling of persevering, of uncovering, of belief in beauty after the storm you swore would end it all. 

The brightest green as natural as the leaves on the trees that stood tall through all of the downpour. Through the whipping winds of adversity — through strikes of lightning just seconds delayed, the same way that pain is felt in the aftermath of chaos. 

And it gave me hope — That my eyes were like the flowers birthed from the showers each spring. That pain was a part of living – and so was I. 

That the hurting was part of the seasons I would go through. To die, to revive, to bloom, to thrive – to be a part of something beyond me. 

That like the storms, when timed, when analyzed — when therapized – it could all be controlled. 

That doing so didn’t mean preventing, it didn’t mean minimizing, or pretending that it wasn’t what it was. It was the knowing – that it would pass, that it always did, and it always would — and telling myself that this shall too. 

That the green would never be its brightest hue without a storm breaking. 

Like the flowers, and the trees, and every living thing — my eyes were proof that the growing comes after the release of things buried deep – under soil that no longer served the earth – that no longer served me. 

That behind these hazel eyes was a storm brewing, but once expressed, would make way for my blooming. 

I just had to let go, to accept the mess that came with healing, to remember that beauty is found in new beginnings, that pain was a part of growing, and that I would find myself in the aftermath of it all – smiling.

That this was only natural.