Angel

Some eyes will make you feel loved. Some other eyes, when you love strongly enough, can make you feel home. And then some eyes, if you are lucky enough to notice them, will make you feel as though you’ve been blessed by an angel.

I was on a several-hour flight, on my way back to the ones I love. Across the isle from me, one row forward, sat a young woman. She was maybe 19 or 20 years of age, with blonde air nonchalantly tied up in a pony tail, wearing a plain white tank top under a grey hoodie with some matching grey sweat pants. By most measure, she was an average young person. But I had seen her eyes back inside the terminal, glowing as they were from fifty feet away as she prepared to board. And those eyes… My goodness. And her face…

Some people have a power that you can sense from their expression. She was such a creature.

There are always those who insist that perfect beauty doesn’t exist, except from within the pages of color magazines manufactured through the judicious use of Photoshop filters. I have never believed that, for beauty is much more than a static image, and perfection is much more than a rare set of measurements. It isn’t the picture of a person that captures us but instead her imagined extrapolations. It is the way she moves, the way she is, the way she makes you feel when she looks at you…

Sitting diagonally from me, the young woman was radiating something special. At one moment during the flight, I happened to look in her direction and her eyes caught mine. She wasn’t just looking distractedly in my direction; she was looking straight at me. She wasn’t smiling nor glaring. There was no malice nor intrusion in her stare. Her face squarely turned toward mine, her eyes were perfectly and quietly focused on my presence.

It could have been such as the furtive look that strangers give each other in passing on the street, but it wasn’t.

In that short moment where she graced me with her gaze, I didn’t feel surprise or shyness. I didn’t feel exposed or observed or revealed. It only felt quite natural. She was just looking at me, purely and simply, intently but without prying. And being captured by her big bright eyes felt soothingly comfortable. Instead of feeling like the looker was trying to take something from me, I felt as though she was giving me something.

In the matter of a few seconds it was over, and I remember smiling.

A few rows in front of us was a couple with a baby. He was about a year-old, and was really not fond of the idea of being propelled in the middle of the sky inside a noisy pressurized cabin. The poor child cried and cried. The tears eventually turned to screams, and the mother had no choice but to stand up and try to rock him to some level of quietness. However nothing would seemingly do. The distraught woman stood there holding the screaming child as we watched.

And then the simplest of things happened: the young woman across the isle looked up at him.

I saw it all happen. She first made eye contact with him, using her body language to grab his attention, opening her eyes wide and making her face bright. As soon as he locked his focus on her, her face lit up and her mouth opened in a beautiful, loving smile. And instantly, the baby stopped crying.

I was looking at him. She was several rows away, but he was staring back at her in utter fascination, quiet as can be. She was smiling, and instantly he was soothed, just like that.

The same routine occurred several other times during the flight. And every single time, no amount of rocking and loving care from the mother would do. And then the young woman across the isle would look up from her screen or from her book, and instantly the child would meld into a soft mid-summer breeze. You could literally see on his face the glow that she radiated. It was amazing and beautiful.

Later I started daydreaming of this young woman as a baby herself, held closely by her loving mother. In my mind there was no question that the girl’s beautiful eyes had been even more pure then. I imagined her mother looking into them, and how striking those moments must have been.

How many thousands, millions of times did it repeat? Did her mother know she was giving this child a special gift? Or did she feel the same way we all did when graced with the gentle stare of this baby’s beautiful gaze?

For a time I wondered if her mother knew that she had given birth to an angel.