Those Eyes

I read or heard or imagined a quote once that eyes where the window the soul. Maybe I took it too much to heart. But those eyes have always opened the door to my heart.

At first maybe it was the challenge in them at recess, a glint of competition at the four square field. Or maybe later at the middle school camp when truth or dare seemed the most dangerous game that could be played.

Later those eyes were wide and innocent within a theater production, I was tasked to ask them to put on a happy face, to shake off the gray skies. And I desperately wanted to make them happy. Through life and misfortune, I wanted to make those eyes smile, even if i couldn't fix the reality of life and death and burdens too heavy for most teenagers.

Then they were eyes that were focused on the future, on results, on potential on anything but what was in front of them in their last semester. I wanted those eyes on me, to see me so much. I hijacked the plan those eyes had. And in the end, didn't live up to the promises my eyes had made.

A read through isn't supposed to change a life. It's but words fumbled through with rarely any connection. Yet I found those eyes in that first ready through and I couldn't escape the connection. A read through is the first run through of living someone else's truth through your own lips. But in that moment I found an accidental, unavoidable truth.

Eyes maybe the window to the soul. But that soul in my experience is my own, I have learned so much about myself from falling into the depths of another's eyes.

Love, pain, confusion, lust, terror, trust, disappointment and hope. What I saw in each of those eyes will never leave me and in a way I will never truly understand what I saw.