When your eyes caught mine, you were looking at me. Deep dark eyes, round with wisdom and curiosity, it shook my soul. My heart pounded but I told it to still. My palms began to sweat. Suddenly, keeping my concentration on anything else was a struggle. You had me.

The night was beautiful. The three of us had taken the car out. The usual trip to Ikano was today my burden. As my dad plonked his tired body down into the plush seat of a Starbucks cushioned single sofa with his laptop bag in hand, my mom and I headed off to the shops. We purchased necessities and niceties, we chatted about our life's affairs, we stopped for some local coffee on the way. The night was mellow, and just what I needed.

The drive home reflected the entire evening, but no one knew the terror I bore.

With one hand on the steering wheel, something out-of-the-ordinary caught my eye. Sporadic night traffic was swirling around me, I couldn't focus my sight on this unusual thing. "Is it a loose wire?" I thought. My hand reached out to touch the black, wiry thing sticking to the interior of the car's A-pillar. I couldn't reach it. Traffic eased and I finally got a good look at the mysterious thing.

It was black, and then something sparkled. Your beady eyes stared back at me. Deep dark eyes, round with wisdom and curiosity, it shook my soul. My heart pounded but I told it to still. My palms began to sweat. Suddenly, keeping my concentration on anything else was a struggle.

I had no response for the conversation I was having with my dad. My mom uttered a panicked "Slow down!" as I approached the car in front just slightly faster than the constant speed I had maintained up till then. The rest of the ride home was silent and almost unsuspectingly rushed. As the car rolled up toward our house, I asked my dad quietly without ever removing my eyes from the road, "Do you know how we can get rid of a lizard in a car?" And that was when the horror and fear took over my body. My hands trembled, taking several tries before parking the car right. I practically pushed my dad's sick body out from the passenger seat so that I could, in turn, alight the car from his side.

He spent the next 10 minutes struggling to get that squirming lizard out of the car unharmed. I stood by the sidelines imagining fingers wrapping newspaper around the lizard's body, and then the application of much much more pressure.

P.S. Thank God I couldn't reach it.