Faces

I see faces, faces everywhere, good faces, sullen faces, dark faces, fair faces, lovely faces, and faces which do not say anything. I see faces when I am asleep, I see faces when I am awake, I see faces when I am in a crowd of people and I also see faces when I am alone. I drink to drown the faces in a pool of drowsiness; I smoke to hide the faces behind the haze of dense clouds. But besides all these antics, I still continue to see the faces, faces which form shape in the clouds of the smoke and on the layers of the alcohol that I drink.

Then came a moment, a time, when I decided to live with it. I see both familiar faces and unfamiliar faces. Sometimes I feel joyous and quite exactly overjoyed to see the familiar faces and sometimes they make me morose. Those familiar faces which make me morose are the ones who in a distant past I liked the most, but now all of them have left me only visiting me in my hallucinations and I whispering to them, begging to them and shooing them ignominiously to leave me alone and let me live in my loneliness.

I had been seeing faces all my breathing life, both when I am conscious and when I am unconscious. I never understood whether the faces are in pursuit of me or I am in pursuit of a face(s). Over the years the difference has faded, like the fading breath of a dying man on a sick bed. There wasn’t a day that I haven’t seen a single face, and now, there isn’t a day that I would miss seeing a single face. Now, it has become an obsession, it has become a recreation, it has become a reason for me to live.

I could never speak about these faces to anyone. In my tender years, I was scared of being reprimanded; in my innocent years, I was scared of being put in an asylum; and in my mature years, I am scared that no one would believe. I could never understand why I saw the faces. I thought, I read, I analyzed, I wondered, I meditated, but, whatsoever I did, I never lost a face and I never understood the device for which the creator made me to see the faces.

Until one day, sitting in my cell, seeing the faces pass by my eyes and I taking a cursory notice of the images in my mind or in front of my eyes, I realized, I saw a face without a face at all. I concentrated hard on that no face. The no face as I would like to call was no way close to any of the faces that I have seen in all these multitude of days and nights that I have passed watching silently, speaking to no one. The no face’s face was without any life, it was as white as dead man’s face; it had two dots as eyes, with no expression in them; it had no lips, all one stretch of skin from head to the neck. No face was like a child’s craft, making a face out of a sheet of paper with his scissors by cutting out small pieces of paper from the middle for the eyes, nose and mouth. Why I call this no face and not ugly, because a face has to have a face to be called ugly or beautiful, this was beyond any compare, it was simply faceless.

Then whose no face is it? And how is this no face related to my ability of seeing so many faces all throughout my life? It only took me a moment to realize that it is compensation, a consolation, a divine intervention to compensate something which I never had. I am the man with a no face. It is my face without a face. From that moment on I stopped seeing any more faces, everything vanished, like the coins in magician’s hands, vanishing, vanishing forever. And I, continue to live with the memory of my own face, the no face for the rest of my life.