A Familiar Face

Photo by Aditya Sethia on Unsplash

I heard once, don’t ask me where, that our brains remember the faces we encounter, even those we only see in passing. That’s why we dream about strangers, only to pass them days later on a street corner or in a supermarket aisle. Supposedly, it is our subconscious playing games. But mine doesn’t just play games. It remembers.

It’s not a gift, though it may sound like it is to some, but not to me. I remember every single face I have ever seen. Some of them I only ever saw once. Still, I can see them now as clearly as I did then. Their pores, their scars, the twitch of their mouths forever trapped in my head.

Sometimes they visit me in the quiet hours of the morning, right before the light leaks in through the blinds. I’ll blink, and there they are: someone I passed on the platform a decade ago, mouth open in a stifled scream, eyes fraught with fright.

I remember a man in particular with a crooked tooth who sold umbrellas outside the station and a teenager in a green hoodie who had a bruise shaped like a thumb beneath his jaw. I never learnt their names, but I see them when I close my eyes for some reason.

I suppose it started early. Or maybe I was born with it. The remembering, I mean. But that is not the worst part. The worst part is the reading. It’s like my mind plays fortune teller every time I lock eyes with someone and, magically, I’m in their heads reading their bloody minds.

But I don’t really read their minds. I just get this feeling, I guess, deep in the pit of my gut? It tells me things I shouldn’t know. Terrible things. Like the rape, the murder, the cruelty human beings were capable of. The rot each of us carries within.

I know what this sounds like to some, but it’s not magic, not some sixth sense that should be studied in a lab. It’s real – real enough that I can’t look away, can’t turn it off, can’t un-know what I know. You’d be surprised how many people wear masks that barely hide the rot underneath, how many smiles morph into a grotesque rictus when you look at the wrong time, and how many eyes linger a little too long.

I didn’t tell anyone at first. Not because I thought they wouldn’t believe me, but because I didn’t want this to be real. Thought I could somehow pretend I was normal if I kept this curse to myself.

When I was younger, maybe twelve or thirteen, I told my mum I didn’t like how the neighbour looked at me. I said he had ‘the same eyes as a stray dog.’ She laughed it off and thought I was being dramatic or maybe cute. A week later, he was arrested for stalking a woman who lived down the road. Coincidence, right? That’s what I tried to tell myself, too. But it kept happening. People I avoided turned out to be dangerous, and people I was drawn to turned out to be broken. Like me.

Some people wear their pain on their skin, you know, while others hide it. That was my reality, as well, and so, I never spoke about those horrible visions to anyone. Instead, I kept my head low and watched, collecting faces like a graveyard collects the dead. But I never found one quite like mine; I stared at mirrors for years, thinking maybe it would come to me, that same recognition I got when I saw others. But all I ever saw was a blur behind the eyes. A blank. A stranger. Like I’d been erased.

That’s when the doubt crept in. What if the reason I couldn’t read myself was because a face like mine did not exist? Or maybe I was protecting myself by forgetting something terrible? I started dreaming about that. Not nightmares. Just some random dreams where I’d stand in a crowd of all the faces I’d ever seen, and every single one would look at me. 

There was one face I saw over and over in those dreams.

A little girl.

She never said a word or anything of that sort. Just stood there, barefoot in the snow, hands at her sides, hair soaked and clinging to her cheeks. Sometimes she looked up at me. Sometimes she didn’t. But she was always there. The same place, the same posture. Still as a photograph. Still… as the dead.

I used to think she was part of my imagination. A fragment of memory that didn’t mean anything. But I don’t think like that anymore, not after what happened, that is.

Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. This curse, this memory thing, whatever you want to call it, it wears you down over time. At first, you think you can handle it. You tell yourself it makes you more aware, more cautious, maybe even smarter. You avoid danger. You see through lies. You see through people. Should be a gift, right?

I wished it were.

But then something changes, you know? You stop wanting to see.

You stop wanting to know. You close your eyes on the street, turn your head on the bus, and keep your gaze pinned to the floor at the market. You start hating crowds, not because you’re anxious, but because you don’t want to bring more faces home with you. You start seeing shadows in every expression, secrets in every crooked smile. And you start imagining people looking back at you through the walls, through reflections, and through closed lids.

And eventually, you wonder if the danger was never them.

It was always you. Always you…

Continue.