Glances

The brown eyes looked obstinately into the green ones across the kitchen table, and could feel that the eyebrows were hanging a little too far down low to match the smile, but it was too late to correct. The green eyes had looked a bit dumbstruck and worried by the oblique accusation that had just entered their mind. Brown-eyes thought grimly that some justice had been brought to the injured (and absent) third party with blue-grey eyes, now that the story from two weeks back had been revealed. But she also felt that it was awful that her bad mood hadn't been fully curbed by now. It hadn't been a pleasant thing for Green-eyes to hear, but he probably hadn't thought that Blue-eyes would take his snide comments seriously. (She had.)

The brown eyes looked down at the tabletop, then up again. The green gaze was now nailed to the bowl of sunflower seeds. So they turned their full attention to the gradually disappearing sandwich that was being held by a cold hand. Brown-eyes had spent most of the day looking at the world in a violet rage and trying to calm down, and was still seeing undertones in everything. And now the green eyes had left the apartment again, to go look at the laundry in the cellar. The brown eyes gazed impassively at the kitchen, looked again at the unknown number on the cell-phone that she'd refused to answer, and eventually roamed into the living room. A look at the iTunes list on the computer screen gave brown-eyes the impression that electronica was the order of the day, mostly french but also one norwegian-sounding name. The voices layered over the beats were invariably young girls with slightly nasal voices, but it sounded OK. Brown-eyes had spent the day working to a soundtrack that matched her drama-crash-all foul mood and was a bit tired.

They had had a conversation between four eyes about why Brown-eyes had woken up angry that morning, whether Green-eyes would get his contract renewed and how his recent trip abroad had been. Green-eyes had told enough people about the trip by then to be sick of it, but obliged. The wonders of digital photography had at least let Brown-eyes see some of the things he'd seen. They'd actually looked at a very dark photo at one point with about six or seven white dots on it. "Animal eyes", he had said conspirationally. Brown-eyes had thought they looked more like stars, and didn't feel particularly watched.

Green-eyes came back and there was a lull. A long one. A total silence in fact. It wasn't hostile, but it wasn't relaxed either. The brown eyes floated past in the hallway and noted with a sidelong glance that Green-eyes was focusing completely on the shirts that were being piled into a closet. The feeling that she was overstaying her welcome dawned upon Brown-eyes, and she said:
"I'm going now."

She saw the colour of the wall behind him very clearly when they hugged goodbye, and immediately forgot it. She looked very intently at her gloves while she pulled them on in the hallway. Black leather, and a bit too small because they were her mother's. She could feel her mother's eyes on her even if she wasn't there. Of course, Brown-eyes wasn't looking up, so the ceiling lamp in the hall got punched twice from below.

She knew what her eyes looked like when she exited the building. She could feel the sadness, a kind of resignment. She didn't like the word finality, but it hovered in the back of her mind. The saddest thing of all was that she felt less lonely now that she'd decided to go home.

And when the blonde girl with the dark eyes at the bus stop looked up as Brown-eyes approached, she felt the difference between being looked at and being seen.