Faces

Thinking of faces. What are they? When you're a child you draw them as an oval; then you attach eyes, a nose, a mouth. Ears, too, if you're really into details. That's why Mr. Potato head is such a popular toy, i suppose. We're obsessed with faces. We love to attach things to them, to guess their story. If you're shy you avert your eyes, as if looking away from a face made your own disappear.

There is no other part of the body we decorate more: rouge, lipstick, earrings, shaving, waxing, filing away of cheekbones, whitening tooth paste, facial soap, piercings, base, depilation, nose-hair trimming, silicones for the lips, rimmel, glittery dental caps, eye-shadow, mint drops, artificial eyelashes, haircuts, lip balm, wigs, nose jobs, facial scrubs, liftings, anti-wrinkle cream...

Yet we don't consciously think of faces all that much. I guess that as we grow up we become used to them. We learn to see them as a whole. Only sometimes you pull back, and you wonder why a nose is where it is. You're taken aback, your analytical mind hits static.

The mouth, smooth and red, tiny vertical lines on lips, and where the lips meet, an angle, as if a hinge. The mouth is not round. Sometimes there is that fuzz that grows above the upper lip, those creases that converge on the toothy gap, fractured as if river canyons that run to an inland sea. The tongue, why wet? The nose, no such thing as a cute one: all grotesque, mountains and caves on a smooth plain. The ears, atrophied things that do not move, misplaced, the wings on Mercury's sandals. The eyes frustrating, not windows of the soul but a reminder that you can never get past them, you can't ever really get in. The forehead that goes on and on, a wasteland, twin to the cheeks.