I am a bit of a people watcher. In class. At practice. Everywhere. I sit back and watch, taking silent notes of expressions and body language. Through this people-watching, I’ve realized that the mind is a strange thing. It can be thinking of something completely different than what is happening at the moment. I’ve become an expert in reading body language, but I’ve started to wish I could read minds.

People sometimes get this look on their faces, sitting in class. Distant. Foggy. Gone. Like they have been ripped from their conscious mind and they are floating above themselves. Or when someone laughs in a silent room. Or when you can see the tears welling up in someone's eyes, and their desperate attempts to build a dam and keep them in. I wish I knew what they were thinking. I wish I could read their mind like a book. Laugh at that joke that was left unspoken. Know the right thing to say to pull them back down to Earth. Know what to do to help patch the dam.

It's entirely selfish, my wanting to know what is going through someone’s brain. It is my curiosity to help someone who I have spent way too much time analyzing. To be helpful. To be wanted. To not say the wrong thing and to know what the right thing is. To truly, completely know someone. To not get burned again and again by people who don’t show their true colors until it is too late. 

There are some people whose minds I crave to read. The boy who looks at me and smiles when I ask why. Who goes to shyly say something, then suddenly stops. Or my best friend, who carries her burdens all on her own. I want to share in their feelings, so they don’t feel so alone. And I don’t either.