Eye Contact

I had an experience in New York City this weekend that, well, it’s what I live for. It’s these things that makes me love New York. Because New York, while it’s one of the fullest and (over)populated cities in the world, it’s also, partially because of its masses of people, one of the most lonely cities. It’s one of the hardest places to people-watch without feeling lonely seeing how many people there are.

These people, they’re all strangers. They are all people that I don’t know, and as a result, I can be surrounded by thousands of people and still be, well, alone. But every once in a while, something happens to change the way I look at the world and break through that feeling of loneliness. It all starts with eye-contact.

I was in the subway, the downtown 6-train, from 96^th street going to Union Square. A cute girl wearing a brown dress with a flowered pattern, a pink headband, and brown flip-flops got on the train at 86^th street and was crammed in the same area as me. For a few stops, we were (among the many) sharing the pole in the middle of the train. I kept moving around to different parts of the train, but I never stopped watching her for some reason. Somehow, I ended up by the doors on the left side of the train, leaning against the doors instead of holding on to a hand-rail. (Don’t tell the MTA…the signs all say to not lean against the doors, but everyone does it anyway.)

I was at the door when it opened at Grand Central when the girl started to get off. She looked up at me. We made eye-contact. Her eyes were large and a light brown, similar to the shading of her dress and her footwear. Her eyes were beautiful and filled with emotion. As she and I locked eyes, we froze. She looked like she was going to cry. Her eyes were wide, looking up at me, as her mouth was puckered and whimpering as if to be holding off tears. She was grasping in her left hand her necklace, a silver heart. I’m sure if I knew jewelry, I could say for sure, but it looked like something I’ve seen in a Tiffany’s advertisement.

The moment our eyes locked felt longer than it really was, I’m sure. It was probably no more than 7 seconds, but it felt like eternity. The world slowed in that moment. It’s as if this girl was letting me into her life. Her heart was broken, I could see. I don’t know if it was broken by the past, or the impending future, but in this moment, there is nothing I wanted more than to reach out and hug this girl. (I of course didn’t, because as my friend said, ‘yeah…hugging complete strangers on the train isn’t usually a good idea.’ And she’s right; it isn’t a good idea. But the moment we shared was probably as good as a hug.)

I was hurting, not for this girl, but with this girl. This is what eye-contact does. It turns complete strangers into, well, humans. This girl and I are still complete strangers. We don’t know the other’s name, and we never will. We will probably never see each other again, but for that brief moment, we shared a moment of truth. It was truth that cannot be shared with those closest. It was this moment of her letting her guard down, all made possible by eye-contact.

This is not a unique incident, at least in my life. Eye-contact reveals such naked honesty and emotion all the time, whether pain and sadness, like this or the eye-contact I’m sure I shot people in my darkest hour when I was too dark to even try to hide it, or at brighter times when eye-contact creates a contagious joy.

People hear some of the stories I have of my New York City, and people ask me how exactly I manage to get into these situations. The answer is quite simple: Because I let myself. I let myself be approached. I let myself make eye-contact. I let myself engage in a conversation with someone who is normally ignored my society.

Maybe it’s because I see so many people pretending to be something else and I’m constantly looking for honesty in this world of facades and fake niceties and politics (in the non-governmental sense) just to get ahead. Maybe it’s because the hopeless romantic in me wants to lock eyes with someone and actually open my mouth and fall in love. Maybe it’s because I’m constantly hoping to find someone who can change my life or that I can be that person to change someone else’s life just by being honest.

Maybe I took the pre-school lesson to heart and I do treat everyone as I wish to be treated.

Either way, I’d say it’s working out for me overall. I may not have hugged her, but I’d like to think that in 7-seconds of eye-contact, the girl in the brown dress got out of my eyes that I understood what her eyes were saying and that she isn’t alone in this world, and that she was probably going to cry soon and that it’s okay.

She was probably too wrapped up in her sadness and pain to get all of that out of me. But at least I could share her pain, if only briefly, and I hope that it helped her subconscious if not her conscious. And if not, it was not in vain; it was a moment I enjoyed. And in the end, that’s all I can really control.