It was the shortest moment. Maybe not even a real moment. Just a beat between breaths in the light of morning falling through the skylights.

I simply paused in front of your marine blue eyes and thought, I know these eyes. And I remember the first time I saw them at the top of 3 flights of New York stairs in a hempy haze of moxie stick burned by your acupuncturist who you later told me saved your life.

Maybe then I didn’t know how much was there for me, how far you’d take me and allow me to go, still, yes, I thought I know you still, 19 years later: I still touch that place I found in the doorway there.

Better yet, I looked into those iris’s that have really seen me and I felt known by you.

And I did not blanch at being seen.