With Tears in Her Eyes



          "Why didn't you snap at her?" asked the boy's friend.

          "I did...a little," said the boy.

          The boy's friend looked him up and down.

          "You don't look angry, though."

          The boy shook his head contemplatively.

          "But she told you off in front of all your friends."

          "Yes."

          "And got up in your grill to tell you all the ways you need to shape up."

          "Yes."

          "And made you look like a fool."

          The boy sighed, "Yeah."

          "So why is she still your friend?" asked the friend bewilderedly.

          The boy shrugged in such a way that his friend knew that he knew the answer perfectly well but just didn't want to come out with it.

          "Come on man, what gives?  You've been acting real funny lately."

          "I don't know."

          "Anyone else you would have ripped to pieces right there, but you just stood there and took it."

          The boy stared, unresponsive, at something beyond the row of dark green lockers in front of them.

          "Why?  Why after everything she did to ruin your credibility are you not hopping mad at her?"

          The boy paused, realizing finally that he wasn't going to get anywhere without coming out with it.  He looked up at the other boy.

          "It was the tears in her eyes."


          There are a million wrong ways to try to help someone who needs it, but the right way is with tears in your eyes.  Sometimes the tears don't physically trickle out your eyelids, but they are there, plain as day, for the one to whom you go to the rescue.  They trickle gently down into your heart until they light a fire that can never be quenched.  What water can dowse a flame started by tears?

       Sometimes your heart thinks more clearly than your mind as it clenches fast on that thing that is actually worth thinking about.  Sometimes the philosophy of one footstep in front of the other is mightier than the tightly crafted exposition of abstract reality, after which composition the writer carefully sets it in a corner and then acts in such a way so as to completely betray it in favor of a quite different grasp of the 
things.  When all is said and done, we won't count our coins or prizes.  In fact, the only concern amid the many pieces of life we didn't really understand will be the one question:

    Did I have tears in my eyes?

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 Agnes, Dreaming, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode,Jessica Weimar, Eye, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode Emily, Sept 16 2007, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode

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