Eyes on Fire by Sara Travis

From the corner I watch her work the room.

She walks – no, no – she saunters between the cliques of people, lifting her glass in manicured fingers, laughing her tinkling laugh that wraps itself around my heart, squeezing and squeezing until I think I might die. She leans in closer to hear the punch line of some joke, throwing her head back and placing a playful hand on his chest. It’s torture but I can’t look away. Her auburn curls sit around her shoulders, and God, what I wouldn’t give to run my hands through them. She kicks her heels off to dance with him, and her feet are perfect, her toes are perfect, her legs are perfect. She is perfect and I want her to be mine, but she will never be mine because she doesn’t notice me. She never notices me. I stand in the darkened corner and I sip my beer and I avoid eye contact with anyone and I stare at my shoelaces and I ignore the pangs of hunger in my stomach because this is a party so there’s a buffet, and I can’t eat from the buffet because how much is too much? I think I read that it’s socially unacceptable to go back for seconds at a buffet, so then do I just pile as much food on as I can and ignore the looks from my co-workers, and the not-so-subtle glances at my beer belly, or do I just take a small plate and eat in the corner and hope I don’t have potato salad in my beard? No, better to have nothing and burn the calories from lunch simply by standing up. Don’t look at her, you’ll make it obvious. Stop it. Don’t look at her. She’s dancing to a slow song now, and his hands are on her waist and her head is against his shoulder and if I squint a bit it’s almost as if she’s dancing with me and what I’m seeing now is an out-of-body experience, but his hand is lower, grazing her lower back, and that’s not me, because that’s impolite, I’m a gentleman, and now I’m staring again, but it’s so much effort to look away when she’s so beautiful, so perfect, and so not mine. So I don’t look away, I stare and now I don’t care who knows it, I’m staring because she is heaven and if my eyes were lasers I could burn a hole straight through his head and swoop in to catch her before she falls, and she’ll know at last and she’ll love me back and we will be perfect.

But it doesn’t work like that. She never dances her dances with me. And every time I feel my gut coil with envy. Because she doesn’t notice me. She never notices me.