Your Eyes

 

It was the look in your eyes. That’s what I remember the most. 

Your laughing, wrinkle-edged eyes had gone blank. 

But that’s not quite right. They weren’t blank - blank eyes would have been a mercy, blank eyes might have had an explanation I could swallow, blank eyes would have been a question mark. 

No, your eyes were not blank, they were dark. Cold. You looked at me and I swear I saw something like hatred. They were not a question mark at all. They were a period after a short, harsh sentence.

And the sentence scared me. Most of all because I couldn’t quite interpret it. 

What were you saying with that look? I’m not reading into it, I know that. It was not in my head. You were not simply overtired, having a bad day. 

No.

You were angry with me. You were  challenging me. But why? And why were you doing this when I was alone?

Except I wasn’t alone, of course. There was a room full of people, with their eyes on both of us, a room full of people witnessing the anger in your eyes. Could they see the anger in your eyes? Maybe not. Maybe that anger was just for me. My own personal torment. A Dante-style punishment for the sins you saw in me. 

And maybe that’s the problem. The reason that your final look of hatred hurt so badly.

Because deep down, I knew. In the stillness of my heart, I heard that short, cruel sentence, punctuated by the dark in your eyes.