The kid with an old soul learns how to play all the stares and their instruments. Your orchestra usually plays soft music to stay in the zone when you look. The other kids don’t get it and use cymbals as their throw stones. Sometimes the conductor’s mind goo signals for a higher tone to preserve limits in the shadows. The sheets take their own shape early on and get better as you go.
My very first encounter with the stare happened on the walk home from elementary school. Before all this, a stare was just a stare. A pedestrian push button turned Picasso when I hit the walk arrow at an intersection. The brush motioned to a car suspended in time and space at the red light. In that car, a man painted a very serious portrait. It was a sad visage that carried too much valise. The man was somewhere else. His eyes were not waiting for the green light. They carried a weight of many clocks and memories that had gone berserk. It was a stare fed up, with eyes that led to narrow roads only God would know. But the chase in the look was there. It wanted to be in many other places, but not there.
“When I grow up, I never want to have that stare,” I told myself as I gazed at the driver from my safari tram viewpoint.
The above stare, now labeled The Casual Driver, has not been forgotten. Its weight still sinks into an occasional worry that poses existential assessment.
Now a long-legged adult, I understand how dangerous it can be to categorize. What was The Casual Driver to me might be labeled a graceful The Swan look to another. The Forager? The Wild Onion? The same stare can be interpreted differently depending on the name.
It was only many years later when I found out what my true wrong was. I never sent well-wishing to The Casual Driver. My defense mechanism at the time was to go into hiding through repulsion. There was no process or place that took me to understand - very faulty thinking to believe in a label that justifies mistreatment.
Some of you sickos are thinking of more serious confrontational stares like The Murderer, The Take Your Wife, The Took Your Money, etc. Those stares aren’t the ones in discussion – put down your axe. What’s in contemplation here are stares that don’t ever notice us. These are the ones we notice from afar and still make us feel jarred. The Serious Mother talks to The Renegade Teen at the shopping mall. The Queen who sees The Soulmate King in a festival crowd. The Last Minutes from a man to The Son as you walk past a hospital room.
Do the stares come to us at random? Are they collages of our internal flair? What’s known to me now is that a distant stare should not cause beware. Sometimes they are just meant to be there, like the wildlife that abounds.
But in some rare cases, the interspace doesn’t protect you. The Stares decide to look back and meet your label halfway in the road like a jester.
