Eyes Never Change

There is nothing like the power of your childhood memories. They can bring a smile to your face, or tears to your eyes. They can wrongfully commit a man to decades in prison, and even bring down powerful empires.

The triggers can be a smell, a song, the weather, or like Usher says, even a person who reminds you of a girl, that you once knew.

Years may pass, then one day, like from an unexpected earthquake, you could be overtaken by a tsunami of emotions. It happens to all of us.

This may be a person who you haven’t seen for awhile. An old friend, a past love? A classmate? Hell, you may have even kept in touch with them for some time. Yet, until you stand in front of them, the memories lay dormant.

Then one day you set eyes on them. You both may have changed a bit. Father Time spares none of us, but there are certain things that will never change.

I have spoken in the past about how eyes don’t really change. We may put on a few pounds, develop some crow’s feet, and lose some pep to our step, but our eyes, those don’t change.

Never has this been more apparent to me than when I recently encountered an old friend whom I haven’t seen in person in nearly two decades. Though the years apart have made us strangers who have had to once again reconnect, her eyes they still remain the same.

Skype, Facebook, nor many telephone conversations could have prepared me for the way it felt to actually stand in front of her. When we last set eyes on each other, we were children. Today, we have children of our own. Children who are nearly the same age we were back when we’d play handball in the Bronx parks. How bizarre is that?

Though I am nearly 40 years old, for those brief moments that I spoke to her, I was transported back to my late teens. Her eyes took me back in time, and I felt like that young kid who had crushes, and did things like pretending to like handball in order to gain a woman’s time.

It was fascinating to me how this happened. As I mentioned before, we have spoken on Skype, but until she was in front of me, the flashback of youthful memories was not triggered.

This all happened because eyes never change.