This Is My Face

There’s a rusty tin hourglass sitting over there on that corner table. It’s trying to stare me down. The heavy maroon curtains fall off of the curtain rod unceremoniously. It’s so random that all I can do is laugh after the slight moment of apprehension passed as quickly as the curtain had fallen. The stars are turning their backs on me. It isn’t a stormy night, but the stars are barely visible. I focus my gaze on one of them, hoping that the longer I stare at it, the brighter it will become, in this moment I feel as if I believe it will become brighter then it will. The opposite happens. Stars seeming to close dark eyelids around themselves leave an empty sea of darkness. I collapse on the bed.

What’s it all for anyhow? You are educated until you can bear no more and then you are sent to a much weightier institution which is somehow treated more as a joke than the more juvenile halls of learning. You get inconsequential job here and another one there to make enough money to support your education that is supposedly going to your great life’s work. So many people get caught up there it seems. They get caught up on the side roads, getting more prestige and raises in the side-quests, that they adjust their thinking and find themselves justified now that their cognitive dissonance has subsided. Of COURSE they wanted their career to be in nine to five shoe stores. They say it’s the smell of new rubber. I say they’re too afraid to go after what they really want because they’ve become comfortable in something that was “good enough”.

A crimson line flows out from underneath my bed. I fall to the floor, compelled towards it as if a large magnate resides within my gut and continues to pull me towards the crimson line that is still making its way to the large window now naked of its maroon curtain. Illuminated numbers appear above and below the crimson line and as I gaze at 1987, the first number, a heavy booted foot nearly crushes my fingers.

“This is everything and this is nothing. This is good and this is bad. This is unlimited and this is limited.”

If the dark hooded figure were not enough, then, floating towards me, a woman dressed in white lace and silk says faintly, “It is near that time”.

Sweat begins to bead on my forehead. I’m too young and too old all in an instant. I have seen everything that I have seen and I have not seen everything that I wanted to see. The images of happy times and sad times fall from my brain to the crimson line, organizing themselves into their correct order as memories strangely never seemed to do for me when they called my brain their home.


“And what if you had died here?” The dark hooded figure bellows at me as its finger points at an illuminated number. I try to reply, but no easy answer comes to my lips. I find that odd. The question has entered my head countless times before. I should be able to murmur at least a theory, something I learned in that moment, something I wouldn’t have learned.

I finally manage to say something “Well… I wouldn’t have realized how interested I am in people I suppose… and… I wouldn’t have seen how those large foreboding figures known as adults are just old children who have learned to play games as their hobby; they wear their invisible masks like it’s Halloween every day.”

It continues to point at dates and demands me give the significance of that specific date and tell it what happened.

“But what if you had lived?” The graceful, floating woman points sadly at some different dates and some of the same dates as the hooded figure.

I’m perplexed. “What do you mean by ‘but what if you had lived’? I’m alive aren’t I?

“Yes,” she smiles, still with that look of sadness in her eyes, her lips fervently trying to retain that shape of a smile, “but, you let yourself die inside here” she points at an illuminated date “and here, and here, and here. What would have happened if you had lived in that moment?”

It becomes too clear all the times that I had spent just surviving, just drifting from moment to moment, my senses dull to everything around me. Those moments of feeling truly alive were few and far between. I’m thinking back now to that night sky, the stars, all so faint. I look back to the night sky and the dark void remains as dark as it was a moment ago. “If I had lived,” I now decide it would be a good idea to respond to her question, “then I would have arrived here, or somewhere else, anywhere really, much sooner. I think I would have been happier. I think that my metaphorical “goblet of life” would be more close to being full than it is now; right now I feel close to empty. “

The hooded figure takes off its hood and to my astonishment it is, I mean, she looks identical to the floating lady. They both smile at me, a little less sadly than before. “We are called The Perspective.” They take up the illuminated numbers in their hands and toss them at me. The numbers transform mid-air to the shapes of puzzle pieces. “What? Am I supposed to put it all together? Am I supposed to put all these dates together so that they make some sort of ‘big picture’?” I laugh loudly and sarcastically, throwing the pieces to the floor. Some of the pieces break and then most of the pieces vanish. One of the floating ladies picks up a broken piece and puts the pieces in my hand.

“You see, all of those other pieces which are the moments good and bad in your life, could not come about without this piece being here. It all connects, you see? There are ups and there are downs, yes. But it’s all moving and breathing motion from your lungs, sight from your eyes, sounds from your ears. No, you cannot always be fully alive, but isn’t it something grand that we can all strive for?”

They were gone as soon as they had appeared. I put the puzzle piece in my pocket and crawled into bed after putting the whole pieces together as best I could. From the looks of it, it was beginning to take the shape of staff paper with music notes sprawled on the side and frantically written lyrics popping up through the five lines here and there. It was a mess, but it was my mess. I’m sitting here, holding the broken puzzle piece in my hand, sleep over taking me in slight waves. My loss of consciousness is ever so subtle and ever so gentle.


And I can’t tell if I dreamt this or not, but I still have the puzzle scar to prove it. The broken puzzle piece, at the very, least “seemed” to grow hot in my hand and I hurled it at the window to keep it from burning straight to the bone. The glass shattered and the puzzle piece exploded the darkness like a firework.

Tears run down my face, but not in disgrace, because this is not my mask, this is my face.