The Eye Collector never liked looking into the eyes of people.
A gaze always betrayed the true intentions of a person.
When he looked into the eyes of someone, especially an angry person, they always told him a different story. He had never stared straight into the eyes of a person and seen something that left him happy. They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, which is true.
But then, the Eye Collector pondered, would you want to see into a person’s soul?
The Classmate
We argued, and since I had just broken up, I wanted to win every argument. I wanted my classmate to just listen to me, to pander to my ridiculous ideas and whining. But my classmate didn’t. He was being selfish. And it was then that the I yelled at his classmate, told him that he didn’t know what he had, and asked if it would kill him to be a bro just this once.
But when I stared him straight in the eye, and looked, I knew. My classmate was in pain – not because of what the he had said, but because he was having romantic issues of his own. I saw tears about to explode, and I realised that my condemnation of his selfishness, my assumption of his perfect love, and my presumption of his ingratitude was what brought the truth to light.
Even before he said it, I knew he was having problems with his girlfriend too. He told me off, said that I wasn’t the only one to have problems, before running to the toilet.
A month later, they broke up.
His eyes told me that before it happened.
The Mother
I didn’t know why she overdosed. I tried my best, I was there for her, I did everything I could. But when it came down to it, when I wasn’t looking, she swallowed every tablet she could find. Luckily, she called me for help, and I saw her into the hospital to be stomach pumped.
But I wasn’t her relative. Love didn’t make you relatives. I had to call her family, her mother. And her mother came, a Mandarin-speaking lady. I tried my best to explain, to tell her what had happened, in pidgin Mandarin. My broken sentences and limited vocabulary struggled to tell her why it had happened.
And then she asked me why. She said three small words.
“为什么?”
I tried to explain. She was upset about what had between you and… your husband. She felt overburdened by having to take care of everyone. She wanted you to –
Then I looked up into her eyes, and I saw her pain, and what she was really asking.
She wasn’t asking me why this had happened. It wasn’t the logic or the reason behind it. Her eyes, shiny globes of so many traumatising experiences, but none as painful as seeing your daughter try to end her life, her eyes bored straight into mine.
She was really asking me if she had wronged her daughter so much. She was asking me if it was her fault that this happened. She was asking me whether she had been a bad mother.
I could answer what her lips had asked.
But I couldn’t answer what her eyes truly wanted to know.
The Student
I had explained that my job was more a function of good circumstances and the right people, rather than a checklist of items to be crossed off on the way to creativity. I honestly did not know if I would be able to replicate it given a second try.
Of course, that didn’t mean you didn’t try. It just meant that you had to go into this with your eyes wide open, that you had to know the odds weren’t in anyone’s favour, that it just as much a matter of who you knew as what you knew.
So this student came up to me later, with one of those strange names that identified her as being a Gen Z-er, or whatever the term was for those who were half my age. I smiled, and talked to her as she bombarded me with a whole list of naive questions.
Then she asked, could she be one too if she studied hard and took the right modules?
I smiled, and was about to give a horribly politically correct answer when I happened to look into her eyes. And then I realised what was there, that was in all the students I had spoken to, that I had lost. That all my peers lost.
It wasn’t naivety. It was sincerity, hope, belief in a better world. She genuinely believed that it was possible to be achieve your dreams and be happy and make money and have a perfect job.
Her eyes had this shine, not the type of shine that you would attribute to a beautiful girl, but the type of shine that came from a earnest love for an industry. A shine that belay so many hopes and dreams that would soon be shattered by the “exigencies of work” as stipulated by a contract. A castle in the clouds that would be laid low by restrictions from authorities, censors, sponsors, clients, and colleagues.
But didn’t we all have that shine, once? Did we lose it all? What happened to me and my peers?
Our eyes have dulled, but their eyes shone.
The Boss
As usual, his unreasonable demands had so many reasons behind them. It was to show we were timely, savvy, and all manner of shameless words that you would only hear in this industry. I snapped, and told him off.
Everyone had told me to be more accepting and forgiving of him. Everyone told me that hey, he had so many illnesses but he meant well, he tried to be a good father to his son even though he no longer had custody of the boy, he had such brilliant ideas that were always quashed by the ill intentions of others.
So I held my tongue as he dragged me to another room by the collar, and then said “Fuck you” to my face.
I stared back, ready to smash his face in with a nearby chair, stared straight into his eyes, and then I saw it. I saw why he had said it.
It was despair. He had nothing left, nothing that he could count as an accomplishment. His life was worthless, at least to him. He only had money, and even that would run out one day. He had no true friends – everyone was friendly to him only because of his money. He had left a devastating wake of burnt bridges at all his previous companies, since he made it clear that he left because everyone at his previous workplaces was too dumb for his vast intellect.
His eyes, like so many before him, brimmed with tears. Tears that formed anger and sadness and pain and fused them together into pools of pain. I saw straight into his eyes, and realised that when he said “Fuck you” it was because he wanted to say it to himself. But he couldn’t – how could he, with his immeasurable IQ – and so it had to come out somewhere else.
So I stopped. I stopped, and I said OK. I looked at him, at his eyes, and said OK.
I had never seen such despair in the eyes of a man before.
The Friend
I do not know what turned my normally pleasant, mild-mannered friend into a being of such rage, but it happened suddenly, by the side of the road.
Perhaps it was something I said that evoked such a response. I felt a punch almost land on my face, if not for the fact that he wasn’t the violent sort. I retaliated verbally as well, but my first thought was to get off the road, never mind if I got punched. So we did.
And then he let me have it. All my faults, the fears that I shared, the friendship I thought he had – all of his was volatile ammunition to get me to, I don’t know. I didn’t know what was his intention, but I stared him down and was prepared to let him have it. I was not going to take all this verbal abuse lying down.
That was then I saw, that despite his rage, despite all that anger, he was about to tear.
His eyes were red, and slightly swollen, and I knew that if it continued – well, I had not known him long enough to know what exactly would happen.
He yelled at me not treat him like his brothers did, like his friends did, like everyone around him did. Not to treat him like he didn’t know what to do. And there it was, an unfulfilled longing that even he did not know was there.
But in the short time I had known him, I realised that deep down there was a lost urge.
His eyes told me that.
The Eye Collector
With these five eyes in the palm of his hand, the Eye Collector mused.
There it was – their souls, bared for all to see. These eyes held such telling gazes, and each one spoke of a story that only a gaze could tell.
For truly, they were the windows into a person’s soul.
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