♥︎ A window into my soul ♥︎
The first time I really saw Elara, it was in the sterile, fluorescent glow of the high school hallway. Others saw her, of course, but their gaze was always quick, dismissive, or laced with a quiet unease. She was the girl who stared. Not with malice, not with curiosity, but with an unwavering intensity that felt like a physical weight. Her eyes, a murky blue, would fix on a person as if trying to decipher the very code of their being, often holding the stare long past the point of social comfort.
They said she was creepy. They said she was weird. She never spoke back, never offered an excuse. Her lips, thin and pale, rarely parted. Speaking, one eventually learned, simply didn’t come naturally to her. It was as if the words were trapped behind a soundproof wall, leaving her eyes to do all the talking. And what her eyes said to us, in our youthful ignorance, was often misinterpreted as an invasion, a challenge, or worse, something vaguely threatening.
I remember once, a girl had burst into tears outside the gym, a boy having publicly rejected her. Everyone pretended not to notice, hurrying past, averting their eyes from the raw display of adolescent heartbreak. Everyone but Elara. She stood a few feet away, her gaze locked onto the sobbing girl. It wasn’t a sympathetic look, not in the way we understood it. It was too still, too profound. The girl eventually looked up, saw Elara, and let out a choked cry, scrambling away as if from a predator. Elara hadn’t moved. Her shoulders, usually hunched, seemed to sag a little more. She simply watched the empty space where the girl had been, her expression unreadable.
In hindsight, thinking of the prompt, I wonder if that was her way of caring. A silent, unasked question: Did I actually care about you, without a doubt? Maybe that unnerving gaze was her only language for empathy, a desperate attempt to bridge the chasm between her world and ours. Did I unacceptably show you? Yes. I see that now. But for Elara, it was just… normal. It was her normal. And for someone whose internal landscape was so fundamentally different, how could she have known it was unacceptable? She really didn’t know any better.
High school was a nightmare for her. We all saw it, even as we contributed to it, however passively. The empty desk beside her was in every class. The quick huddle of friends dissolved when she approached. The whispers that followed her down the hall, like a phantom cloak woven from judgment and fear. To be different and shunned by her peers was her daily bread. Do we, the “normal” ones, know what that’s like? To navigate a world where your very existence feels like an inconvenience, a visual anomaly that everyone wishes would just… look away?
Elara carried that burden, not just through those years, but, I suspect, since birth. That fundamental disconnect, the way her brain wired her to perceive and interact, had always set her apart. It was a wound that never healed, constantly picked at by the world around her.
Years later, I saw her, fleetingly, in the city. She was at a bus stop, alone, as always. Her hair was streaked with grey now, her face etched with a quiet resignation. A young couple laughed nearby, oblivious. Elara didn’t seem to notice them. Her gaze was fixed, not on a person this time, but on the indifferent flow of traffic. There was nothing she could do to change herself. That much was brutally clear. It was a solitary, unyielding truth. She had to embrace being an outcast of society. Not with defiance, not with pride, but with the weary, profound acceptance of someone who had fought a lifelong battle against their own essence and finally laid down their arms. The dim glow of the city lights did little to soften the dark, isolated silhouette she cut against the backdrop of a bustling, unseeing world.