Faces Worth Observing

     Admit it: We've all hated someone because of the way they style their hair, the clothes they wear, or the car they drive. If allowed to fester for too long, our small, uneducated assumptions can grow into roaring rivers of hatred and egotistical preeminence. On a daily basis, we are attacked by a barrage of rumors and gossip that taint our view of people we have not even met. Though not realizing it at the time, my first party as a freshman in high school would forever change my judgmental, arrogant mindset.
   Palms clammy and nausea twisting my stomach into unidentifiable shapes, I drunkenly stumbled onto the over-crowded balcony where my lungs desperately gasped for fresh air. The night offered me overwhelming smells of marijuana and cheap cigarettes. Gagging and coughing, I fumbled with the glass door for several moments and returned to the noisy hotel room. Collapsing on the floor of the stuffy, overheated room, my disoriented and inebriated brain frantically scanned the room for any familiar face, any friendly smile. The only things I encountered were the blurry, coked-out eyes of a dozen college students looking straight past me, not capable of registering the fourteen-year-old who didn't belong. Empty eyes. I was going to vomit.
   Losing the feeling in my legs, I faltered to the bathroom where I spent an hour bent over the toilet trying to throw-up. Or was it five minutes? Time was a blur. Catching a glimpse of my face in the mirror, I noticed that my usually deep blue eyes were almost entirely black from dilatation, and my tanned, healthy face was now ashen and puffy. My body was shaking uncontrollably and though my head was on fire, my skin was icy to the touch. I couldn't stop staring at the face in the mirror. Fear pounded in my heart and quickly rose to my lungs, creating a lump in the back of my throat that couldn't be swallowed. Was I going to make it through the night? at the time, I didn't think so. I wanted to go home. I wanted a familiar pair of arms to wrap themselves around me and tell me that it was going ot be okay. That's when Meghan* first entered my life.
   Meghan was nineteen at the time. Rumors of her intoxicated nights and promiscuous lifestyle clouded my view of her. She always had a pouch of cocaine in her bra or a joint in her purse and she would sleep with almost anyone. her boyfriend, a thirty-six-year-old drug dealer had three children with two of his previous girlfriends. This is the Meghan I had always heard about and she disgusted me, though I'd never even met her.
   A girl with the kindest blue eyes and the warmest smile I had ever seen came in to see if I was feeling all right. She held my hair as I threw-up into the early morning and, when I slumped to the floor, weary from my body's punishment of the substances I'd pumped into it, she brought me a soft blanket and pillow. She sat with me all night, cooling my burning forehead with a damp washcloth. As exhausted as I was, I couldn't sleep. My body felt as though it were being suspended in mid-air, enveloped by a thick, heavy blackness, my skin almost breaking from the massive pair of invisible hands mercilessly stretching it, ripping it.
   A gently hand delicately shook me awake at three in the afternoon the next day. golden sunlight streamed through the windows of the now empty hotel room. The smell and feel of the previous night still hung in the air and clung to every blank wall of the miserable void. Empty beer bottles covered every horizontal surface, most broken few still intact. I wondered who would clean them up. The girl from the previous night asked me if I needed a ride home. She told me her name was Meghan.
   Since then, Meghan and I have become very close friends, and I've had the privilege of watching her time and time again help those in need. She gives of herself selflessly, and the amount of love and care she's shown total strangers could fill an empty sea. This experience has changed my life in more ways than I could possibly write. It has forever been seared into the core of who I am and who I am becoming. For the first time in my life, I saw a world beyond myself. I saw people for much more than the drugs they'd used of the parties they'd been to. Each person has a story to tell and an experience that has made them who they are. It's a slow process, but I'm learning to genuinely care for others, to be a friend to the friendless, a comfort to the hurting, and a listening ear to the lonely. I've been given new eyes, clear eyes that sea faces worth observing and minds worth knowing.