text: I had just walked across the length of the room and sat down in those annoyingly squeak prone chairs, yet they had a sort of comforting reliability to them. They were those kind of chairs that you could lean all the way back in, it brings you back to when you were a child and you would lean all the way back and hold your head upside down, like some sort of persistent dog trying to accomplish a trick for a treat. However, amidst all the commotion in the room, I must have glanced upward. Perhaps there was a light attracting my attention, or maybe somehow my unconscious knew, and it was trying to force me to notice. Once I saw her though I didn't know what to think, I didn't know what to feel. Her eyes shined like two ancestral jewels, brighter than anything I have ever seen. They lit up her face, her smile, every feature of her was illuminated, and it was in that moment that time seemed to slow down. All the noise around me, all the noise of life and the conversations of others slowly dimmed, it was as if I was caught in a moment of silent serenity as I looked at her and she looked at me. She smiled... I smiled. I wanted to run over and push the person next to her 5 feet away and sit down and introduce myself, but I never had the courage to act like that. What would she have thought? How would she have acted? In those forty seconds my mind worked harder then it had my entire life, I questioned every movement I made, every expression, I quickly grew nervous. Yet she had smiled. She looked me in the eyes and she shared some of that light. Over the next couple months this would happen, I would enter the room and look at her and smile, or she would. I had thought that maybe this smile was just a friendly greeting, a quick moment of expression to greet another person. Yet every single time I would experience that moment. If someone was talking to me, if someone was showing me something, I always knew to look up when she was coming in. It was as if the room got brighter when she stepped through that door... but only I could see it. She changed my world, this was no crush, no fantasy, no dream. She was there, but I simply could not step forward. Maybe I wasn't ready, maybe I was young and now I have grown. Maybe she thinks about those moments, maybe she remembers the smile. If I could go back to that moment, if I could lean back and raise my head to see her... I would smile. But... I would get up and walk into her light.