This face approaching specifies no world. This face I see belongs to a young woman with a very old story to tell. She has lived within the story all her life; it quiets her, and it speaks for her; she contains it, though she believes it to be much larger and more significant than she.

She will want to speak, but she will be prohibited by her guilt, a sense of culpability, as from profound involvement, but really born of too-heavy memories. All this can be read in the pause that overtakes her face, but not a world, not a specific geography, nor ethnicity, nor culture, nor any detail beyond the pause and the guilt and the quiet.

This face approaching has opened a gap in time; I see her as if there were nothing else that could possibly occur in this moment, and she sees that I see this... it is all she knows, for a moment; she lives, for a moment, as if experience itself were a camera trained on the core of her awareness... she is more than she knows how to say; she is wilting.

She is the sort of person, it should be noted, that is likely to give birth to a mystery, or to many. She has a name, and she has a past, but she has found a way to slide between worlds with a sort of ease that actually tastes like discomfort, a luxurious anxiety which she cannot relinquish. This will bring her to ever more unlikely encounters with a mirror she has not decided to understand.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

A FACE
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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