The eyes are incapable of loyalty to a lie. You can read them the way you read still water — not by what’s on the surface, but by what moves beneath it. A person who carries their own soul behind their gaze looks out at the world. A person who carries someone else’s agenda looks through you —at a distance, seeing what they must do.
The smile is easy to borrow. Warmth, charm, the performance worthy of applause — these are costumes, and people wear them well. But the eyes don’t perform. They reveal. And the particular coldness of someone living in service to a hidden interest is unmistakable once you’ve learned to feel it: a stillness that doesn’t soften, an attention that never quite lands on you, only on what you represent to them. To enter someone’s umwelt, you stop hearing what a person says and start seeing what they are.
It can call itself anything it wants. The eyes still belong to a wolf.
David Nadas 
Leave a comment