What do you feel when you catch a glance of someone looking at you right in the eye?

Each individual’s gaze carries their own narratives and consequences. There is the gaze of a mother who looks fondly and warmly at their child. There is the look of the lover’s desirous gaze that seeps into your bones. There is the malignant stare of an enemy who carefully watches your every move in order to calculate your demise. But there’s something about the gaze of a stranger. You have no history with this person, but a synchronicitous look can shake one out of their normal fugue. You create connection that you didn’t intend to establish.

His eyes were an oceanic blue and just as deep as the trenches of the ocean floor. On the other hand, his stare induced an infernal anxiety in me. People always say that eyes are the window to the soul, and even as cliché as it is, I can’t disagree. But it also goes in the other direction. His stare flayed me bare; my wounds were painfully exposed in all their abject glory. In his eyes, I couldn’t escape my reflection.

It’s shocking, really. I knew nothing of this person but in that instant this person saw right through me. In that coffee shop, I felt as vulnerable as one could feel. I’m imprisoned in this present moment, locked in with this stranger whose eyes tell me that he knows aspects of myself that I thought were hidden, things that are occluded from others, but not from him.

I didn’t know how to feel in that moment except exposed and uncomfortable. There was nothing particularly creepy about this stranger, but he was like a spectre that appeared to remind me of things that I fear and there are not a lot things that I do fear. But the things that I do fear weigh on me.