The Man and His Eyes | Ruth Lawlor

     He was a man with a look in his eyes that told how life had ripped the heart from his body and torn it into pieces before handing it back in a barely solid, bloody lump. There was only one bathroom and he had left the door open, intentionally or not I did not know, and he stood by the sink with manic determination, his face a mottled red and beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. It was a communal bathroom, a urinal in one corner, a sanitary bin in the other, though the man did not seem to acknowledge this. In fact, the more I looked at him the more I noticed the streaks of youth in his uncombed hair, the tangled passions of juvenescence that raged in his adolescent veins. He was not a man, but an unshaven teenager, his face bleak and his clothes unkempt.

     His brow shone with exertion as his left hand moved vigorously beneath him; his expression portrayed a frenzied madness, a desperation and anger that seemed to occupy the entirety of the insipid room. The lavatory glowed with a yellowed hue and gave off a telling smell, the toilet paper was damp and crumpled at the edges and the floor was puddled with fluids, bodily or not it was impossible to know. Even as his body relaxed and his face contorted to purple, his hand kept on moving, like a limp fish wrenched from the water and struggling in vain to survive, until eventually it, too, ceased and he fell forward, his body slumped against the wall, his forehead on the cold of the mirror.

     I suppose he heard me then, though maybe he had known all along that I was there, watching not with any judgment but with a voyeuristic curiosity that I found difficult to ignore. He turned with black eyes towards me, but did not have time to respond for by then I had thrown myself at him, and kissed him fervently, as though clasping at a broken parachute before leaping a thousand miles to my death. He grasped me first in astonishment, the muscles in his arms tensed and fraught with anxiety, and then with a sort of resigned desire that seeped slowly through me like a wretched poison in my blood. He was already half undressed and so there was no need for formalities: we carried out our business before going our separate ways, two strangers finding their salvation in the lies of another’s false affection, each with broken dreams of our own, each fighting a losing battle every day with our own minds.