She Saw Me

She saw me
She saw right through me
To the other side of a nothingness
I wasn’t able to fill
Wasn’t able to see in myself

And I couldn’t see her at all
Well, what I saw was fractured
Misaligned
But that wasn’t her
It was all I could see

I’d thought her unfathomable
But she was simply beyond my ken
So all I saw was a shadowy, incomplete form
Like a shape in dim light out of the corner of my eye
A monster one moment, an unfolded shirt the next

She never resolved in my mind
Empty as it was
Of anything real
Or true
Or centred

I sometimes wonder if I could see her now
The beauty underlying all that fractured illusion
Like crystals or prisms, which break up your vision
But, every now and again, catch the light the right way
And suddenly there’s a brilliant rainbow

I’d caught glimpses of that
And it startled me, frightened me
That there could be such perfection
Outside the world of nothingness I’d inhabited
The emptiness I vowed to fill when, inevitably

She took the rainbow away

I wonder, sometimes, if she would still see through me
If there would be something there for her to see
Before the other side of nothingness
Someone she’d want to see, again
For the very first time