There was something infectious about it. It was warm; light-hearted. It had been so long since I’d seen it that I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it really was. But seeing that smile gave me such relief; such hope. Desperate hope that perhaps things were taking a turn for the better. I knew that she had that very same yearning; it shone through her eyes. They were smiling too – I think that’s what meant the most to me. It’s so easy to raise the corners of your mouth, but that doesn’t mean anything, not really. When you smile with your eyes, that’s special. You can’t fake a smile with your eyes, nobody can. Hers were so beautiful; deep and wide and green. Such a vivid, intense shade of green – impossible to envisage. There was a certain maturity about them; but I think that was partly due to the deep circles and lines surrounding them. She had a lot of those, dozens and dozens. It was as if they displayed to the outside world all of the hardship she had encountered; the pain and the sorrow. Each cavernous groove around those eyes symbolized a tear that she had shed in the past few years – and there had been a great deal of them. But those grooves didn’t seem as noticeable when she smiled. The purity of her wide, rich pupils softened all of her harsh blemishes. The glow from her iris melted away each and every imperfection on her delicate face, letting the beauty through and nothing else. I didn’t care about the faded stains of strife that still lay on her forehead; her brow; her cheekbones. They were a part of her now and they always would be. I knew that the trouble wasn’t over for her. She had a long journey yet. Such a long journey that I wasn’t sure she would ever arrive at her much sought after destination; despite how much I wished her to. But at that precise moment, it didn’t matter. This was like a temporary haven from the rain outside. The rain which would still be there, awaiting us, when we came out again. I knew that her smile would weaken and die away until it was no more, and perhaps it wouldn’t choose to visit me again for a long while to come. But I was cherishing the present, where we currently were. And at the present, she was smiling. And it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.