watching her

I have watched her many times, from many perspectives, with many reactionary feelings.

I once saw her enter a room where I was praying as she silently took a seat in the corner. I must have noticed her long brown hair, falling straight to each side of her face, the face to which I could not have been able to place a name, and which I would not have bothered to examine closely. I recognized her, but she was a stranger, there to pray in silent support.

I once watched her as I forcefully withdrew my company from an all-night party of three (a party to which I was more of an intrusion than I would have cared to know at the time). Her smile melted my fragile, yearning heart. I meditated on that smile as I prayed by a duck pond in the deserted, early-morning daylight, and later as I wrote to my journal about the night’s adventures.

I once watched her as she sat close between me and another boy on a crowded train rushing speedily through the Chinese countryside. Emotionally and physically exhausted, I sat in hopeful discomfort. With pressing tears I watched as she rested her tired head upon the shoulder of the other boy. It was the worst thing she could have done to me.

I once looked rapturously into her bright, brown eyes that were looking back upon me, as we lay parallel on my bed, our outstretched hands touching in a moment of simple, breathtaking intimacy. And the only thing that stole my joy in that moment was the conscious understanding that my desire to remain inert and alone with her until time immemorial tinged with the slightest sensation of danger, the recognition of a temptation likened to sin. Perhaps her beaming smile was eclipsing my view of God.

I sat a row behind her in a small auditorium and looked at the back of her head. I thought it profound to consider that that young woman was my girlfriend. I had waited so long before she came along. It was a pleasant thought that she was mine. That was all.

I have seen her cry. I have seen her turn away from me in hurt anger. From slanted angles I have seen her eyes search for my own when I was too ashamed to make direct contact. I have watched her turn a strange cold shoulder while cuddling together and pondered her intentions. Hurting and needy, I too have cried and watched her through my own watery, clouded orbs. How many times have I watched her, obsessed to know what she was thinking, or what was causing me to feel so certain that something was amiss? I have watched her as we approached each other, she moving toward me on the sidewalk or waiting at the doorway with that same lovely smile that I had come to take for granted. I have watched her watch me when I would leave her for the night. Sometimes she waited till I was nearly out of sight, while other times she did not linger.

I sat behind her in a very large stadium and watched her worship God, thinking that she was probably not nearly as distracted by our breakup as I was. For days straight I would sit in that same auditorium, meeting with little success to purge my mind of this distraction. I sat and stood in a room of 22,000 peers, not caring what any of them thought of me, all except for that same one. I have looked somewhat assertively at her face in an attempt to snare her back into loving me again. She looked back only to meet my devotion with sympathy, hardly what I wanted. She looked past me, through me. Am I so transparent? Is my aching heart so abandoned, so forgotten? I have wept for her, for me.

She was a stranger that became an intrigue, an intrigue that became a mystery. Somewhere early on she became a friend, a friend who became a romantic companion. But I think she will always be a mystery, one who, for a time, received my love. No longer. God bless her and keep her.