Walking down the street, I keep my eyes leashed to the ground.

Lord knows that girls can’t let their eyes walk too far ahead of them, lest they run into the wandering eyes of a stranger. A lonely stranger, who’s been staring long enough to think that he has willed your gaze to levitate to his.

A too-long second of a glance can trigger a man to offer you his glass half-full of insecurities. He wants a tip for his generosity. He takes your disarming smile, accepts it as a proposal to further engagement. It’s true — some have forgotten what it’s like to be seen that they mistake eye contact for intimacy. Is loneliness a lack of love?

Loneliness is a lifetime sentence that has nothing to do with you. Everyone gets lonely, victims of the unspoken plague. But untended loneliness reeks of a certain smell, like spilt whiskey on wet carpet two weeks after the fact. Desperation is a perpetual hangover. You know a fear is real when everyone is afraid to talk about it, much less look at it in the face.

So we avert our eyes. Cross the street. We keep our distance. We know it’s dangerous when dad’s been drinking. Just because someone else’s loneliness can bend to fit the shape of your own doesn’t mean that it’s fate.

Someone told me the other day that if you look a person in the eyes for four seconds, you’ll start to feel more attracted to them. I laughed. Should I wear a blindfold then, to make sure you see me for me?

Just because you’re attracted to someone else’s attention doesn’t mean it’s fate.

Maybe the cure for loneliness is for the world to look at each other’s eyes all the time. Maybe then when we fall in love, it’ll be for better reasons. Let’s raise the bar for loneliness and love. Let it meet us higher than our eyes. Set a tightrope straight into the future, our blind hearts walking ahead of our beating eyes.