Eyes are the windows to the soul. The first thing on a person, or in a photo, and what I look at when talking to people are the eyes. The eyes tell me everything I want to know about a person,,,who they are right down to their soul. I am writing this in loving memory of a beautiful friend, Anna, who passed away needlessly due to a form of “bullies” because of a condition which afflicted her eyes. Now some people with afflictions of the eyes only have what is called a lazy eye. I've had friends with this condition over the years and Cliff, my soul mate, had this condition along with the drooping eyelid. He was a huge gentle man who looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame with his lazy eye. He was comfortable with himself and his looks. He was beloved in the town and not above playing practical jokes on strangers regarding his eye. His favorite thing to do to me was close his good eye and say, oh yeah, well I dare you to look me in the eye when you say that! We both made jokes about his eye or played jokes on people. Each time I would start to talk to Cliff it was a normal human reaction to get pulled into looking at his lazy eye or following it. Within a few seconds I could ignore it and not react to it. Anna's condition was much worse. Anna had strabismus. Both of her eyes moved rapidly and continuously from right to left. Much like the cat clocks. Anna was a stunningly beautiful girl who spent her lifetime with people shying away from looking at her at all or for no more than a few seconds at a time. I was one of the few people that always looked Anna in the eyes when we talked. The problem, unknowing to me when it would happen, was if we talked for too long of a time my head would start to shake from side to side along with the movement of her eyes. Anna would always place her warm loving hands on either side of my face to stop the movement and laugh and tell me how silly I was for always looking into her eyes when we talked and that she wouldn't be offended if I didn't. What I wouldn't give today to feel her warm loving hands on my face again! Anna was never seen for her beauty and continually had to put up with jeers and putdowns. They would make remarks about her not being able to get her school picture taken or tell her the only thing she was good for was use as a metronome. Sadly it was always the boys who made the remarks and had to suffer the wrath of the girl students. When Anna got out of school she met a wonderful man and they were about to marry. Anna decided to have surgery to correct her eyes so that she wouldn't be an embarrassment to her soon to be husband. He told Anna it wasn't necessary. Cliff and I asked her not to do it. One surgery led to 2, 3 and by the 4th we lost Anna due to a botched surgery, infection and an unknown allergy to antibiotics. Anna was a beautiful girl that most of the world couldn't get past her moving eyes to see her beauty or treat her like a person who had feelings!!! She died hoping to finally measure up to the standards so she could live in peace and not be an embarrassment to her husband when they got married. Another female friend of mine was extremely flat chested. Boys would call her things as a pirates dream/sunken chest, and carpenter's tool/flat as a board. I tried to talk her out of having the surgery done. In trying to make something out of barely nothing the surgery was botched. Instead of having some chest that was viewable she claims that she came out so deformed in looks that no man would want her. She never married because in trying to set herself up to the world's standards she made her situation worse and couldn't bare the thought of any man seeing her. The amount of people who die each year or become deformed trying to measure up to the standards is unacceptable. Thousands of teen girls die each years of anorexia because the world tells them the need to be as thin as possible. The world and it's standards can in itself be the most cruel bully!!!