By Asher Oliver

The blue I use for his eyes is crushed from lapis imported from lands I shall never see. I grind it fine with mortar and pestle, my joints crackling like dry reeds as I press down. The color stains my fingers. It stains everything.

Even now, after all this time, I still cannot quite capture the precise shade—not the blue of the sky, nor the sea at midday, nor the storm-heavy clouds before the rains. His eyes are something else entirely. They change with the light. They always have.

He’s out walking, I think. He does that sometimes in the afternoons, wandering toward the coast, barefoot on the warm stone path. He says he likes the quiet, and I pretend not to notice when he stays away just long enough to make me miss him.

He’ll be back soon. He always comes back. Usually with sea salt in his hair and a smirk that says he’s done something mildly foolish. I’ll scold him for vanishing so long, and he’ll just lean against the doorframe, arms crossed, like he’s posing for me on purpose. He always insists he isn’t.

But he knows what he does for my eyes.

I prepare the canvas while I wait. It’s already sketched out—just the shape of his shoulders, the curve of his neck. I always start with the eyes, though. I can’t help it. Everything else can be wrong, and the painting will still breathe if the eyes are right. But if they’re wrong? I might as well burn the whole thing.

They were wide and bright, always watching, always knowing. They smiled before his lips ever did. I remember asking him once, “How did you come by those eyes?” He had laughed and said, “Perhaps I stole them from the sea when I was born.” I believed it.

I remember it like a fever dream. He was no more than twenty, maybe less, sitting in the shade of the olive grove behind the temple. He had grass stains on his knees and sunlight caught in his hair. He looked up at me like he already knew what I would become to him.

And I—fool that I am—I tried to look away.

But his eyes wouldn’t let me.

He’s let me paint him a hundred times since then. He acts like it bores him, like he’s humoring a man’s whims, but I know better. He likes the attention. He likes watching me try to translate him onto the canvas.

And I like watching him pretend not to watch me.

I tell him, “Your eyes are never the same color twice.”

He tells me, “Maybe you’re just bad at mixing paints.”

And I laugh. Because no pigment in this world could do justice to the blue he carries. I’ve tried. I’ve crushed sapphire, even the powder of rare river shells. But nothing captures the way they flicker when he’s thinking, or the softness in them when he’s half-asleep and smiling.

The studio smells of oils and sun-warmed wood. I hum to myself as I work. Outside, the cicadas buzz lazily, and I think maybe I hear his footsteps on the path.

I pause, glance at the wall of my studio, expecting to see him standing there.

But he isn’t. Not yet.

So I go on.

I paint him on the cliffs, where the sea wind tried to carry his laughter away. I paint him reclining beneath fig trees, all bronzed skin and careless limbs.

And slowly—though I try not to—I begin to remember. Not the memory I reach for. The other one. The one I never invite, but which always comes.

The storm.

The shouting.

The silence.

He left early, before the sun had risen fully. Said he’d be back before midday. Said he’d bring back fish. Said—

I step back from the painting, the brush trembling in my fingers.

No. Not yet. Let me hold it off a little longer.

I close my eyes.

It’s been twenty-four years. Twenty-four. Gods. I speak to him like he still walks the path outside our home. I speak to him like he’s just out of sight, like I’ll turn around and he’ll be sitting on the steps, biting into a plum, juice on his chin.

But he’s gone.

He’s been gone.

They said it was an accident—storm came out of nowhere, the boat turned, rocks beneath the foam. When they brought him back, he looked like he was only sleeping, only somewhere far from me.

And I—I did nothing for a year. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t paint. I sat in this house and listened to the wind, waiting for a voice I’d never hear again.

But then, one morning, I saw his eyes in my mind—clear and vivid—and I painted them before the image could wash away. Just his eyes. Nothing else.

And I’ve been painting him ever since.

They said it was an accident.

An. Accident.

The boat, the sea, the storm, the foam.

He’s sleeping. He’s sleeping…. He’s sleeping.

And I know my time is coming. I feel it in my bones—cold and slow. Soon I’ll go where he’s gone. And when I do, let me go surrounded by him. Let my last sight be that impossible blue.

Let someone find this house long after I’m gone, and let them wonder who he was—that boy with the sea in his eyes. Let them know he was loved, even if they never learn his name.

Let them know I loved him with all I had.

And let them see, in the color of his eyes, everything I could never say out loud.

Asher Oliver is a new author from Georgia, USA, crafting emotionally rich LGBTQ+ love stories and poems. Their work explores identity, longing, and heartbreak through vivid prose and heartfelt verse.