I’m Listening to Your Eyeballs… no matter what your mouth is saying

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

BUFFALO, NY – Lately, I’ve been keeping a closer ear on people’s eyeballs.
We’ve all trained our mouths to be our servants.

They express what we want them to express. We chose and use our words, our tone, our volume very deliberately, if not consciously.

Quite often, for the sake of appearances, the sake of making it through life, our mouths don’t match what we feel at our core.

When your mouth starts matching your heart, chances of trouble greatly increase. Especially when for one reason or another, what’s in our hearts is something disruptive to the fabric of our life or being. What our heart truly wants may be even forbidden.

So these inner most thoughts aren’t allowed anywhere near the lips. The words are never spoken.

But, again, I lately find myself listening more and more closely to eyeballs. Most of us allow our eyes to say things we’d never let our mouths say.

We don’t even realize what we let our eyes say before its already all out there.

The thing about eyeballs is you don’t need much time. In less than one second, I can see down to your very soul. Thousands of words just poured out of those peepers, and there’s no pulling them back.

It’s often fast and accidental, but its done. And you both realize it. It’s a new reality, this hundred chapter conversation in a glance…

But for the same reason our mouths don’t say the words, we go on as if this pupil to pupil transfer of knowledge never happened. But it did. Instead of discussing with someone that we just stood naked in front of each other, we desperately search for something comfortable to talk about.

In spite of our basic elemental human desire to discuss this new extraordinary deep connection, at a time when real connections with people are so rare, we don’t dive in. We desperately grasp at anything else to talk about. “Wow, look at the rain.”

As much as we need these connections in our lives, I guess we need even more that it not get weird. To avoid the weird, I think many people have just tuned out eyeballs, for fear of making such a powerful connection. I think it’s part of the reason why people’s guards are down. I guess most folks just don’t need that in their day.

But listening to those eyeballs, I find life richer. Weirder but richer…. also more fulfilling and less fulfilling at the same time. Closer yet never more distant now. I’m sure I could say it all better in a half second glance.

Reformatted & Updated pages from staffannouncer.com finding a new home at buffalostories.com
Reformatted & Updated pages from staffannouncer.com finding a new home at buffalostories.com

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Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.