Pay Attention

For a short, immeasurable time, the stars in her eyes stopped spinning, and a subtle expression became apparent on the ridge that swept over her nose to the bottom of her lower lip, from ear to ear. But it vanished quickly. It must have been one of those small expressions--they had a scientific name. They were studied by mischievous academics trying to devise systems to seek out the mechanisms employed by the muscles in the faces of liars. Microexpressions. That's what they were called, I remembered, and they only lasted for a few hundredths of a second. To be viewed objectively, they had to be slowed down on camera. If I could only have recorded her face for that second, and extended it for an hour or two. See the sclera of her eyes fracture like cracked porcelain, see her pupils shrink, running away from reality, recessing into her retina. Or watch as the corners of her billowing lips plummet as if finally released from the tiresome job of keeping up a friendly front without so much as a promise of a pension pay check. Watch her nostrils flare by a quarter of a quarter of a half of an inch, in reflexive unison. To just see such beauty deteriorate under the basest of emotions--hate, fear, anxiety--I would have spent all day training a camera on her face. But as her stars regained their spin, she snapped past me, her feet most utilitarian in protecting her against my concern, against a question that would abuse me for the next few days, just as her microexpression would haunt me every time I looked at myself in a mirror. My features did not hold a comparable range of expressions. I could not briefly look as though I'd seen a tragedy unfolding over the shoulder of a friend. What had she seen? Had it been anything at all? Or was it something creeping out of the woodwork of her tortured mind? Would she tell me? Or would I have to watch her face slip out of its genial place at our every encounter?