Cracked Eyes

Photo Credit: Emily R. Feingold

Over the years I have had the pleasure, honor, disgust, confusion, and concern of meeting a whole host of people from dust ridden janitors to polished politicians. In all stages of life as well, gasping tearing desperately at fading threads to this world to testing their will against insurmountable obstacles. Now please don't take this to be me bragging. For it is more true to say that this events and people were as determined by me as was my losing my hat to the wind this morning than to say that I was in anyway involved in their development. Rather this is a means by which I hope to establish credit for what I next wish to discuss.

On the corner of Cedar Lane today I saw a man. Dressed in a dirty poorly tailored black suit with a white shit and blue tie. What was most distinctive about him however was his bruised face and the funny state in which he wore his hat. The hat was so tight about his head that at first glanced it seemed to be the very cause of the pink, flabby, swelling about his eyes and nose. Needless to say this man was terribly confused. I don't believe he was well acquainted with the sunlight, so its being 4:00 pm it was quite difficult for him. Amid a flurry of  shadowing hands, tripping feet, and an overall disconnect between the desire of the swollen man's brain and his body, I caught his eye with mine. 

This leads us presently to the point of this story. You see, in that glimpse, which by any standard measure time only lasted a fraction of an instant, I was assaulted by flashes of anger and despair. His eyes were so worn down that they had cracked. 

I suspect you have seen cracked eyes before. I certainly have. They are eyes that are no longer capable of hiding. Flashes of emotion stain their withered lenses like ink on water. The pressure of containing and pretending force them to break, leaving deep cracks through which the truth, whatever it may be, comes pouring out.

I do not know how our eyes come to be cracked, only that it is an observable phenomenon that has occurred many times over in my life. Some cracked eyes can be repaired, either washed with tears, patched up with apologies and confessions, or entirely closed off behind a waxy veil of drugs and alcohol. I suspect however that there is a point at which the cracks run too deep and can no longer be hidden or repaired. A point this man had arrived at. A point I am deeply interested in learning more about.