Unexpected tears

The tears came so unexpectedly. One minute they weren’t there, the next they shimmered like unexpected guests in her eyes.

I had been sitting there with her for awhile, our talk familiar. We could revisit the same topic 100,000 times yet it never seemed enough. We knew it was cathartic to us, even if it wasn’t particularly useful. Maybe the tears weren’t so startling. Maybe we both knew that they needed to come.

I should have expected them now that I think about it since from the second I saw her standing outside my office, I immediately noted how lonely she looked standing in the middle of the sidewalk giving me a weak smile. She told me that she was tired from walking around the city all day showing her guest around town yet there was more…something about those saucer sized eyes of her. They not only reflected her exhaustion but a certain weariness of the soul, her sorrow, her repressed sadness.

We grabbed coffee, found seats outside in the beautiful warmish/coolish evening, settling down for a good chat. She spoke of being content, of being glad with all that had transpired in the last few days. She said that she had come to a certain understanding and that she was good. I believed her this time. I knew she was good and that even if the enormity of what had happened hadn’t yet settled in, it would and soon. She needed that moment to sit and talk about it, to ponder and mull and figure things out. I was happy to be there for her.

Then she spoke of Him. He was never far from her mind nor her lips. She tried to make her friends believe that she was moving on, that she wasn’t thinking about him half as much as they may have guessed or that her heart didn’t ache because of him (for him) but she wasn’t convincing those who truly knew her. And those who didn’t know her, couldn’t they see? Her eyes are truly the mirrors of her soul. Those eyes of hers…those damn eyes…they spoke volumes of her inner struggles and pains. And when the tears fell, like mercury glittering in the light of the street lamps, her head tipped forward to an angle so that they did not run down her cheeks, her index finger knuckle swiping them away as if they didn’t belong there, that they were unwanted, I felt such anger rise in me that the very existance of the emotion astonished me. For a second I thought to myself, “I could kill him”.

The tears fell only for seconds, moments even. Yet in those moments, she was more vulnerable than any other moments that we’ve shared together. Of course there were plenty of such similar instances where I saw the soft vulnerability show itself, peaking around the corner of her exaggerated laughter, loud voice, silly bantering but this time it was different. The shadows of night half hid her face and to me, she looked so lost and exposed with her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. My heart broke for her.

During those moments, I thought to myself, "If he’s any sort of a man, if he’s any sort of a human, he’ll reach out and tell her that he sees her, he understands even if he can’t do anything about it (or is unwilling to do anything about it). That’s all she needs, no more. She’s a woman, a woman learns to accept and push back the pain and smile through it and even wish well those who caused her nothing but unimaginable heartache."

She asked me, “Do you think that he still thinks about me?”

I said, “How could he not?”

I want to kill him for doing this to her. I really do. God help him for the hurt he’s causing her even if she holds no ill will…I do. I can’t help it. He’s a coward and pathetic and a wimp. He’s all these things not because of how things went down between them, but because of how he’s dealing with things now. Karma is a bitch and by being the reason behind her continuous pain, by being the reason her heart thuds hard in her chest, twisting so that she has to stop to gasp, he will never find peace, not true peace. Until he does right by her, he'll always be just half happy, half content, half whole.

The truth is, I pity him. He had something, someone amazing in his life even if it was for a brief moment in time. Doesn't he know, so many people never even experience the type of connection, love, passion, togetherness, that they had? How can you not help but pity him? Poor stupid fool.

One day, her tears will be rewarded, every single last one of them. Allah will send to her someone who deserves the unbelievable woman that she is and he will be the man who looks at her and murmurs to himself, "I'm the luckiest SOB on earth." And I know without a doubt, he will be.