As I’ve said before, I’m an observer. I notice people. I notice expressions, gestures, and little things that sometimes don’t seem to match.
But there is one experience I have never been able to explain.
One day at work, a group of people was walking in front of my desk. They were talking, smiling, and laughing together. It looked like a completely normal moment.
Yet out of everyone in that group, I only noticed him.
He was someone I had worked closely with on a few occasions. We knew each other through work, but we weren’t friends outside of work.
He was smiling. He was laughing along with everyone else.
I saw his smile.
But the sorrow I saw in his face was so overwhelming that his smile meant nothing to me.
That’s the only way I can describe it.
His actions were telling me one thing, but my eyes were telling me something completely different.
Sorrow.
Not ordinary sadness. It was a kind of sorrow I had never seen before. It was so overpowering that it immediately put me on alert.
A sense of sorrow that almost made me get up from my desk, walk over to him, and ask, “Are you okay?”
A sense of sorrow that somehow made me feel sad too.
A sense of sorrow I couldn’t explain.
I want to be clear that this was my interpretation of what I saw. I didn’t know what he was actually feeling. He never told me anything was wrong.
But I know what my eyes were telling me.
And I couldn’t shake it.
After he walked away, I opened my email and started writing him a message. I wanted to ask him if he was okay.
Then I deleted it.
I started writing it again.
Then I stopped.
Are you crazy? What is he going to think?
I knew him, but not on that personal level. What was I supposed to say?
I just saw you walking by. You were smiling and laughing, but I saw this overwhelming sorrow in your face. Are you okay?
I had no basis for it. Nothing had happened. He hadn’t said anything to me. Everything I could see on the outside told me he was fine.
Except his face.
So I deleted the email.
But I didn’t delete the feeling.
For a while, the thought of checking on him stayed with me. It almost haunted me. Part of me kept thinking I should reach out, even if it was just a simple hello.
Eventually, the feeling faded.
About two months later, he was shot.
He died a few days later.
When I heard what had happened, his face immediately came back to me.
The smile.
The laughter.
And that overwhelming sorrow.
I didn’t know something was going to happen to him. I wasn’t predicting his future.
I simply saw something I couldn’t explain.
And even today, I still can’t explain it.
Was it intuition?
Can we sometimes sense something without knowing exactly what we are sensing? Can our eyes notice something that our minds don’t understand?
I don’t know.
I know what I saw, but I don’t know what it meant.
What happened two months later didn’t give me an answer. If anything, it left me with more questions.
But there is one thing I wish I had done.
I wish I had sent that email.
I wish I had listened to that feeling and reached out.
Even if all I had said was:
Hello. How are you?
One last time😥
Leave a Reply