Holding back...

Her eyes gave away what she was trying so desperately to hide. Biting her lips hard, holding back what was visibly a barrage of emotions, she sat there squeezing her bag and tensing her shoulders. She was trying hard to put up a strong front. There might have been a cheating husband, a marriage gone bad, a difficult child or a lost love behind this turmoil. Whatever it was, it was the kind that hurt hard and the kind that you couldn't just get over or get rid of overnight.

As she looked up and down, straight at me and then away again, she knew I could see right through her. She knew I could tell, despite her continuous effort to conceal.
She began to purse her lips and bite them in alternation. Her eyes were craving rest and her mind was craving peace. She knew she had to find these herself as they were not going to find her.

There's always an anxiety that comes over you when you realize how visible your pain is and when you can see it through the eyes of another. You feel weak, vulnerable and at some level quite pathetic and this leads to a mounting and unsettling anxiety. Her eyes began to glaze and I could tell she couldn't hold up much longer. I could tell she really needed someone to talk to. She got up at this point to get off at her stop. She looked at me one last time, almost defiantly and then walked out. It was then that it occured to me that she reminded me of someone from not too long ago. As I remembered and looked back, I was taken over by that same unsettling anxiety.

Thoughts and sentiments...

A dear friend once said, 'anyone can love anyone else in this world, it all depends on the time, circumstances and how much they want it'. Two people can go from hating each other to loving each other very quickly and sometimes it's hard to explain why. But how would you explain staying in love with someone forever. Some people just touch our lives in ways that cannot be replaced by others, despite being presented the same circumstances or seemingly the right time.

Relationships are complicated and this is what makes them fundamentally challenging. Some of us shy away from complication for reasons we cannot explain to ourselves, let alone others. Some others have become so intensely occupied with the efforts of self preservation that they have forgotten how to be sensitive to other people. And some of us strangely battle an external acceptance of change and of life's constancy to surprise whilst internally we hold on to the ideals of selfless love where you do anything for the ones you love and will give anything just to see them again. There is so much in life to scale and achieve and each of us creates our own path of adventure as we go along. But sometimes it's important to just stop and take a long hard look at what we really want. Sometimes it's important to make a little more effort to let the people we love know just how much we actually adore them.