He Always Looked Serious

Sometimes an expression becomes the whole story people think they need.

The metal shutters beneath the classroom windows rattled softly each time the wind moved through the corridor. Outside, the basketball court still carried the fading noise of students waiting for late pickup, though most of the classrooms along the upper floors had already emptied for the afternoon. Near the stairwell, an old man pushed a broom slowly along the corridor, pausing now and then to gather damp leaves that had blown in from the open walkways after the rain earlier that day.

Most of the students knew him by sight.

He moved through the school quietly each afternoon in the same faded blue uniform, his keys hanging heavily against his belt whenever he walked. His face always seemed tense, the muscles around his mouth drawn downward in a way that made him appear permanently stern.

Students rarely greeted him.

Some lowered their voices slightly when he passed. Others stepped aside quickly along the corridor as though trying not to attract attention. A few joked about him after he walked away, imitating the stern look on his face or the way he stared without smiling very much.

“He always looks angry,” someone once said while we were waiting outside the hall.

Nobody argued with it.

That afternoon, I stayed back later than usual after finishing a group project upstairs. The sunlight entering through the stairwell windows had softened against the concrete walls, and somewhere downstairs a metal gate rattled briefly before falling still again.

“He always looks angry,” someone once said while we were waiting outside the hall.

Near one of the classroom doors, a stack of worksheets had slipped sideways from a teacher’s trolley after the wind caught the top few pages. The old man had already crouched down before I reached the corridor, gathering the scattered papers slowly with one hand while steadying himself against the wall with the other.

I bent down to help him collect the remaining sheets before they slid further across the floor.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

His voice surprised me.

It carried none of the harshness I had unconsciously attached to his face all those years. Up close, his speech sounded slightly uneven, as though certain words required more effort to shape properly than others.

When he straightened himself again, one side of his mouth shifted more slowly than the other.

Only then did I notice the stiffness along the left side of his face.

He thanked me again before explaining, almost apologetically, that he had suffered a stroke several years earlier. Since then, some of the muscles in his face no longer moved properly.

“Students always think I’m unhappy,” he said with a small laugh that barely lifted his expression at all. “But this is just how my face stays now.”

For a moment, I did not know how to respond.

The corridor remained quiet around us. Somewhere further down the block, a classroom fan continued clicking unevenly as it rotated. A few students passed by the stairwell without looking in our direction.

“Students always think I’m unhappy,” he said

What unsettled me later was not simply that we had misunderstood him.

It was how certain we had become about him without ever really speaking to him long enough to notice otherwise.

After a while, most of us had stopped looking beyond the expression we saw every day in the corridor.

Students began lowering their voices around him. Some avoided walking too closely past him. Others joked about him once he was out of hearing distance.

After enough afternoons passing him along the corridor, the assumption no longer felt like an assumption anymore.

Standing there beside him, I began remembering how often he had quietly helped students in ways most of us barely noticed.

I remembered how often he held doors open for students carrying heavy project boards. How he would quietly move aside to let rushing students pass first along narrow corridors. How he stayed behind during rainy afternoons wiping water from the stairwell floors before students changed classes again.

I remember watching him for a moment after that, realising how easily we stop seeing kindness once we think we already understand the person offering it.

A few minutes later, another student passed by carrying a box of art materials that had begun slipping awkwardly from his arms. Without hesitation, the old man stepped forward to steady the bottom of the box before helping him carry it partway down the corridor toward the staircase.

The student thanked him quickly before hurrying off again.

The old man simply nodded and returned to his broom.

Then, before continuing down the corridor, he paused beside one of the classrooms to straighten a row of chairs that had been left unevenly against the wall before moving on again.

The late sunlight continued stretching across the corridor tiles behind him while the sound of the broom moved slowly ahead, steady and unhurried, long after the students around him had already disappeared downstairs.

Made In His Image

You are made perfectly. Loved deeply. Never beyond hope.

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