To The Sad-eyed Girl
A few days ago you arrived and broke my quiet routine. As if I lived with feathers on my feet, I followed my life distracted, until my lightness was moistened by the clouds of his presence. It is neither stormy nor intense, but like the warm days that mourn the rain ending in its bed, slowly letting up the steam of the past, dense and intoxicated with the sun covered. From the first time I saw you, you seemed to run away from home. It seems to run away from home every day, day after day, a life of frustrated escapes and vain returns.
I know where you start your journey, but I don’t know where it ends. His deep brown eyes are always surrounded by the opaque blue of sleepless nights. The dust with which you try to veil the features and colors of loneliness refuses to fulfill its function, as a matter of ethics, leaves exposed, even if covered by a delicate veil of artifices, the sadness that it holds, the sadness that grows and it can no longer be hidden. He silently condemns her, so that perhaps someone will save her. We all need, at times, someone to save us.
As someone who is unaware of the invention of dark glasses, you transform your own eyes into frames, glazing they enter and persist like intransigent lenses. Does not allow anyone to penetrate or be penetrated. The electrical distance of its resistance passes through the roulette wheel and seeks a window to which it turns inflexibly. Naive are those who think you’re looking for the beaten and disheveled landscapes of urban aesthetics. I know you just want to avoid the other passengers. I watch you discreetly, with tenderness and fear, thinking, who knows, one day I’ll come closer.
But her whole body repels any presence, as if all hugs were made of thorns. Who can judge, without knowing, how many thorns he endured for his life? How many thorns still torture your soul? The memory, the trauma. I don’t know, but I feel, despite your distance, feel your clouds soaking my feathers. Everyday I know where you start your journey, you may know where mine ends. I descend carrying their disturbed and aching essences, a sweet and unpretentious scent of someone who has resigned himself to emptiness.
Today, as life sometimes makes fun of interrupting the monotonous haze of routine, when I went down the traffic was stopped. I could see you from the outside. His glazed eyes didn’t see me. They weren’t far away, they weren’t aware, they seemed completely turned inward, absorbed in introspection. They barely blinked, as if they were afraid to let go of tears that way. The lips were not curved in any direction. They pressed together in a line as if holding back the cry, imprisoning it in the tension of all the muscles of the face. The eyebrows seemed to ignore all the feelings that showed on the face, like someone who got tired of pushing himself so hard.
It was not rude, it was light, all his tension, all his disregard for his own affections, living his days, one after the other, running away from home, ignoring the pain, ignoring everyone, ignoring everything, turned inward . He carried the singular music in his ears. I already noticed, but today I could see, in his eyes, I saw the selfish notes that reached his ears only. Unlike the reason I suppose you glue your face to the window before any eyes can find yours, the music could just be to hide outside noises, but you really listened. Or did you hear yourself like a song? It doesn’t matter that much, as long as there’s music, there’s hope.
I follow my course, every day, day after day, since the day your clouds weighed my feathers, and I take your blatantly sad gaze as a new gaze haunts mine. When I arrive at work and see the smiling faces, the automatic greetings, the usual conversations, some politeness and some stupidity exchanging barbs, vying for attention, I seek in all eyes the truth that theirs reveal shamelessly.
It’s not that everyone carries a sadness like yours, maybe they don’t even carry any sadness at all. But from these eyes of yours, framed by the blue of sleepless nights, I see them so simply sincere, like someone who got tired of pretending and assumed running away from home every day. Your escape is the inevitable stop. Admittedly, we cannot stop without major consequences. We are lost and your eyes condemn this loss.
So I search, rather careful not to be discovered in my crime, I search for the deepest feelings hidden behind all eyes. I realize that eyes are not just made up of irises and pupils. Every texture, color, line and expression of the skin that drapes them all concerns the eyes. But what about the eyes? The truth and the lie of each one live chaotically in the eyes. The inevitable of what you try to avoid. Paying attention to the eyes of others is to bare the other without permission. This vulgarity of knowing without asking permission. My crime. I have changed since then.
I no longer believe so easily in what is superficial. Its clouds weighing my feathers forced me to strengthen my hollow, thin bones so that I could move. I live with the discomfort of looking into the eyes and realizing how much they hide. There are pains there, girl, there are pains like yours, much better protected. There are different pains. There are perversions and darkness. The pettiest feelings. But what really scares me is that there is love, there is kindness, there is compassion, there is tenderness. All very well hidden too. No matter what they hide, they hide. The tightly guarded emotions, the chained desires. When do they manifest? Do they allow sleep to come at night, when the deep silence makes possible the tormented noises of these prisoners?
And then, as if today I saw you from the front for the first time, through the glass, your exposed forehead highlighted with all the others in the background, as if the bus were a frame made to highlight your uniqueness against the shadows in profile and backs or faces that even from the front were shadows, I perceived, in feeble reflection, my own shadow. When I found time to steal from my own reserve, I stared in the mirror. I tried to get in my own eyes. I tried to find out what they were hiding, or if they were sincere. I desperately sought to see. I stared at myself in anguish, devouring all features, textures, colors and shapes. I went into shock. I looked and didn’t see. In the glass of the mirror what I saw were his eyes. All your face. Your image and memory. Your clouds. Your escape.
From this one-sided interaction we have, I take your gaze with me. Not like baggage, but like a virus. Something that has taken part and taken care of my body, my mind, transforms me on a daily basis. Transforms my own gaze before I can meet him. It’s just the inevitable, because if I didn’t see what I see before, I would never seek my eyes as I do now. I wouldn’t have yours pushing me on this quest.
I would lie if I said I don’t feel the desire to get closer and I would lie if I said I do. I’m so completely stunned by understanding what I want that I just see and feel, whatever, how it is. From all that I said, from this anguish of yours permeating my being, I only hope, I wish, this I know, that one day you can give your eyes rest. Closing them permanently for the weight they carry and then opening them new for everything to come, some lightness, so that they can manifest densely, intensely perhaps, so many other affections, with the same beauty with which today they manifest sadness.
Eduardo wrote this letter during working hours to give vent to the unbearable thoughts that came to him since this girl, with sad eyes, started to board the same bus that took him on her way every day.
He took care to weave handwritten and legible each word, folded the paper carefully and addressed the girl as best he could:
“ To the girl with the sad eyes, from this embarkation point ”.
He needed to specify, because he knew there were a lot of sad-eyed girls out there. But he wanted it to come to that.
The intentions that led him to this could be a little selfish, or who knows, just noble. He didn’t want to violate the girl’s sadness with futile phrases of motivation. Not even offering help without her asking, maybe even needing it. He accepted that sadness could exist, like so many other affections, it just shouldn’t be the only affection… A matter of survival. Of living. I wanted to tell her that without trying to change what was happening to her without her permission. I respected what I saw and admired. Only. Respect or cowardice? Haunted by his dilemmas, not knowing what to do, he just did what he could.
He wrote down the words and threw the note out of the bus window on his way back to the house, at the point where the girl always boarded. He hoped she would find him. He feared she would find him. It is contradictory as we are, as we are so unaccustomed to improbable initiatives, that if we take them, we are not sure if we would like them to work for fear of reaction, for fear of consequences. The only thing that comforted him was the certainty that what he admired in the girl’s eyes was not the sadness, but the sincerity with which they expressed themselves.
