Eyes Like Hers

I’ve heard it said that we are born looking for someone looking for us. Makes sense, right? It’s usually, at the very least, our mother who is looking for us, waiting to see who was growing inside of her all of those months. From that moment of birth on, our eyes are always searching the earth, the horizon, looking for someone who is looking for us. That was certainly true of me. I was born looking for someone looking for me. I must have known from inside the womb that my mother didn’t want me. Can an unborn child know that, sense the rejection from the body carrying it? I think so. Instead of feeling welcomed, I must have felt unwanted.  

My father was too busy looking for someone looking for him that he didn’t notice me either. He couldn’t see that I was looking for him. He wasn’t mean, though, like my mother. No, just indifferent towards my existence. I learned from a young age that I had to take care of myself, stay out of the way. Made myself mayonnaise sandwiches all through elementary school, while I watched my friends eat their carefully prepared lunches, made by a mother who loved them, ham and salami, even peanut butter and jelly looked full of love to my tiny eyes, still looking for someone looking for me.

My mother rejected me from the day I was born, and it only got worse as I grew. It was like she was hiding from me. She hid in her whiskey glass, hid in her secretary job, hid by going out at night with friends, barely tolerated me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t likable. I was a good kid. I did what was asked of me, and more, actually. I wanted to please her, to somehow gain her approval, but nothing I did was ever good enough to catch her attention. She was beautiful, by the way. Long, dark hair that smelled like jasmine, and dark, soulful eyes. Broken, though. Her eyes, I mean. They were broken. I don’t think they were ever whole. When she met your gaze, if she ever did, you could see the brokenness in those deep eyes. A well of pain contained in them. She had grown up in foster care, unwanted. I think she was incapable of loving me because she had never been loved. I can see that now, but as a boy, I didn’t understand it. Looking at me through broken eyes made me feel broken. I knew she could only see pieces of me, not my whole. How could she, through broken eyes?

It was the summer between 4th and 5th grade that my best friend, Johnny, brought the magazines to the baseball field. I remember the day, because it was the first time I ever felt like someone was looking for me. He pulled them out of his backpack, crumpled from being jammed in there with his candy, sunflower seeds, baseball glove, and ball. We had learned to bring as many snacks to the field as we could smuggle out of our houses, that way we could play until sundown. That was summer, playing baseball and eating sunflower seeds and candy. But today was different because he had also brought magazines. He unwrinkled them and laid them there in front of me, so many women, naked, staring at me. Their eyes didn’t look broken, like my mother’s. They were looking at me with allure, like I was the most desirable person on the planet. They were all looking for me, every single one of them, offering me something that I had never before felt in my life. Admired, accepted, wanted, welcomed. Their breasts gave me this feeling that I could never have put into words at the time, but now I can explain as complete, enough, magical. Half of me said to run, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this, but the other half was captivated. Half of me was filled with shame, and half with intrigue.

They talked about Heaven in Sunday school, how there would be angels, how God keeps our tears in a bottle, and in Heaven, every tear would be wiped from our eyes. I remember thinking, how is that possible? How could God remember every tear I’ve ever cried? There were so many, and I was only a kid. What about the tears that welled up but never fell, did God know about those, too? Sometimes those hurt the most, the ones that I had to hold in and stop. And how many more would come? The Sunday school teacher, the one with the plaid dress and glasses, said God would wipe every tear, and for some reason, I believed her. That image of life without tears, of beauty and hope, was what those images did to me that day. Just like being in that Sunday school classroom, learning of Heaven, those pictures were an escape from the pain around me. They gave me the sensation of being wanted, accepted, which, in my ten year old boy body, I quickly confused with love.

I had never experienced love in real life. I knew my friends liked me. I was born looking for someone looking for me, and I think I gave off that vibe, like I was looking for you. So whether or not I felt wanted by them, I know I made them feel wanted by me, which made them like me. It worked out for me. I had a lot of friends. That’s maybe what saved me. I wasn’t wanted at home, but I was welcomed at school.

I said my mother was mean to me. I don’t know if she was born without a kind bone in her body, or if life had hardened her bones and her heart. Regardless, not only was her glance towards me harsh, but her tone, her words, her actions. She rarely got near me. Actually, I don’t remember her ever embracing me.  

She was never at the school plays, and the shame of that ate away at me for years. Everyone else seemed to have someone hugging them, championing them. For me, I would always conveniently have to go to the bathroom after a school play, as the families gathered together and celebrated. I’d hide in there until the noise had stopped and I felt safe to come out, safe to show my aloneness.

Shame. The opposite of someone looking for you, the opposite of looking for someone. It was the fear that no one was looking for you, that if someone ever found the real me, they would run. It was during those school plays that I first met Shame. Actually, it was when Shame found me. I would hide in the bathroom, in my little boy body, not understanding why no one was looking for me, why my mother was the only mother not present.  

Shame grew as my mother’s meanness grew. I once gave her a Christmas gift, a new hairbrush. I had noticed that her old one was missing a few bristles. She loved to brush her hair at night. Maybe that’s why it was so beautiful and shiny…all of that brushing. I was so excited to give her the gift. At that time, I still had hope that maybe she’d love me, look for me. I must have been in 5th grade. It was when I started mowing the neighbors’ lawns to earn money. Yeah, that’s right. I was in 5th grade. I bought the brush secretly on the walk home from school one day in December and hid it in my closet, under some clothes. I was so excited, I could barely wait for Christmas morning. When the morning came, I was waiting for her when she got up. I was looking for her, waiting for her to come down our stairs in her robe. She finally did and I handed her the present, a red box wrapped with a gold bow. I remember it as if it were yesterday.

“What’s this?” She asked. “Who’s this from?”

Strange question, considering I didn’t have siblings. It had always been just me, an “accident,” she told me one night after way too much whiskey, “an unfortunate mistake.” That’s what I was, an unfortunate mistake.

“It’s from me, Ma.” I said, trying to contain my anticipation, picturing her running that brush through her long dark hair, thinking of me every time she saw the brush.

She looked at me with disdain, and then at the gift. She handed it back to me, pushed it into my hands.

“I don’t need anything from you.”

She’d never said my name. I hadn’t realized it until then. She’d never called my name, never wanted me near her enough to call me, had never looked for me, never come outside to call me in for dinner, like my friends’ moms. The only time I had ever heard her speak my name was when she was introducing me to someone.

Something broke permanently in me that day. I think I had held onto hope, believed that if I either loved her enough or was good enough, that she’d change and love me back, want me, look for me. Hope died that day. And the death of hope is perhaps the greatest death of all. I didn’t realize it until later in life, but I grieved that death for a long time.

And so went my relationship with women. They terrified me. They terrified me because they had the power to break me. My mom had broken me, let me down, and yet, I was transfixed by the beauty, the magic of a woman. It was unattainable in real life, so I slipped into fantasy. My relationship with them started with magazines on that pivotal day in summer, and evolved to computer screens, and then phones that we all carried around in our pockets. Strange, how we started carrying them with us everywhere. For me, it meant I had a woman of my choice in my pocket at any time. They were looking for me, or so part of me believed when I was looking at them. The broken part of me, but that’s the only part of myself I knew. 

I went through high school and then college, spending nights hiding in my room with those images of women on the screens. My friends were out with real women, and there I was, safe with the screens. No way to be hurt by a screen. A screen couldn’t tell me I was foolish or not good enough, and they told me quite the opposite…that I was good enough. Strangely enough, Shame always followed.

I remember having so many mixed emotions watching my friends experience women. They’d be infatuated and then heartbroken, again and again. I watched them looking for someone looking for them, all through college. I lived in my fantasy world every night, in the dark. I’d find those women, their eyes fixed on me, looking for me.

It was with Shame that I was sitting in Starbucks that day, shortly after I graduated with my degree in law, as I watched people pass by, everyone with someone else. I was thinking to myself, how my screen women, with the big breasts and blonde hair, the perfect eye contact, never glancing away, their gaze always fixed on me, weren’t actually going to sit with me at Starbucks, walk down the street with me. I sat, instead, with the shame of having never been loved by an actual woman. A woman with eyes of any kind, whole or broken. It was Shame talking to me, telling me I’d never find anyone looking for me, anyone but the screen women. Shame was interrupted by a woman’s voice, shaking me out of my reverie.  

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I was so busy talking with Shame that I hadn’t even heard what she said.

“Oh, I just asked you if this chair was taken?” The voice belonged to a beautiful woman, about my age, with sapphire eyes and rich brown hair, the color of mahogany. Her eyes were the type that smiled, even when she wasn’t smiling, but merely asking for a chair.

“Oh, uh, no, I’m not using it,” I stammered, feeling exposed and vulnerable, like she must have heard the whole conversation Shame and I had just been having. How could she have missed it? It was so loud.

She smiled, a knowing smile, probably used to men stuttering around her.

“May I use it? I’m meeting a few friends and we don’t have enough chairs.”

“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled, still not recovered from the way she had burst into my internal conversation.

“Thanks,” she said and took the chair, setting it up at the table she was sitting at with a few girlfriends, who all seemed happy to be with her.

I should say it differently. It’s not that they seemed happy to be with her, it was that they all seemed to fit together. One organism, with many parts, that’s how I saw that table that day. I couldn’t even hear what they were talking about, but it was the way that she talked to them. I had never seen eyes like hers. They weren’t broken, but they weren’t whole either. She gave them completely to whoever she was looking at at the moment. It was like the screen girls, but this one was outside of the screen. She was looking for each of her friends, and had found them, and you had that sense from her.

I was supposed to be working, applying for jobs at law firms, actually, but instead, I pretended to work while watching the young woman and her friends. They eventually left, seemingly more whole and fulfilled than when they had first gathered.

That night, when I turned off my bedroom light and reached for my phone, the screen lighting up with those images, the women staring at me, tempting me with their bodies that I could never actually touch, other than in my imagination, all I could do was think of the woman with the sapphire eyes. I found myself frequenting that Starbucks over the next few days, hoping to see her again, if only to watch her.

It was about six weeks later that I sat in the same Starbucks, catching up on some emails, that she walked in again, more beautiful than I remembered. I saw her look around for a spot to sit, but it was packed. I looked down, afraid to meet her eyes.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I heard her voice ask.

I was, in fact, waiting for her, but I didn’t know it yet.  

“Um, oh, no, not today,” I responded, afraid that she could see right through me and knew that I was never waiting to meet someone.

“Can I sit here? I’m sorry to impose, but there are no free tables and I have to get a few emails in within the hour,” she asked politely.

I couldn’t believe it. A million thoughts ran through my head, but I couldn’t grab onto any of them. It seemed as though all of the blood rushed out of my brain and into my face.

“Oh, yeah, sure.” I managed to get out of my mouth miraculously, and collected some papers that I had spread out over the table.

She looked relieved.

“Thanks so much. I won’t get in your way,” she said, not knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get anything done with her sitting so close. I had avoided live females ever since my mom rejected the Christmas gift, and until her, I had never seen anything so captivating. It was her energy, the way she made me feel that she could see right into me. I’d have to pretend to work.

“I’m Winter, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you.” I said, out of sheer routine. I was depending on routine at this point.

She smiled. 

“And you are?”

Shame filled me and I stuffed it down, didn’t want her to see it.

“Sam.”

“You look stressed, what are you working on?” She asked, that same engagement she had with her friends now focused on me. I told myself to play it cool, tried not to squirm.

I told her that I was newly hired at a law firm and starting with a few small cases. I talked longer than I meant to, but the truth was, no one had ever listened to me like that before, received me so attentively.  

I had the common sense to ask her what she was working on, and she filled me in on her work as a budding journalist. She ended up never opening her laptop. We talked for two hours, which felt like two minutes. Somehow the conversation turned towards childhood, and she told me all about her travels growing up as a military kid and how she was ready to call someplace home.

Much happened between then and now, including my final goodbye to the screen women. Actually, after that first day we sat together, I never felt right with them. She was just so…real. She told me one day, several months after we started dating, that she felt like she had been looking for me her entire life.  

 Why am I reminiscing about all of this now, how far I’ve come? How I was born looking for someone looking for me, how I searched countless magazines and screens, only to come up more and more empty each time? Well, my wife, the one with the sapphire eyes, is having a baby boy this month. I want my son to know, every day of his life, on both the good days and painful days, that he was born into arms who were looking for him.