It happened at the grocery store first. The woman checking my things looked at me with a corner smile. “Things been goin’ good lately?” Lately? That word was an inexplicable addition–an implication of familiarity. I told her yeah, sure, how have things been for you? “Oh you know me, sweetie! I got your regular discount in there for you–total is $11.72.” I paid and left, thanking the woman I had never seen before. I looked down at my hands. They felt strangled in the handles of the plastic bag they were holding. After these incidents, I always look at my hands–a practice from years of lucid dreaming–to make sure they are real, mine, and that the number of fingers will always stay the same. I started wearing family rings as a reliable artifice against the fear of inhabiting another body, another reality. They never come off.
These kinds of interactions have happened to me my entire life; people think they know me, a face they can’t put their finger on, haven’t they seen me somewhere before? Sometimes I only remind them of someone they know: a childhood friend, a boyfriend’s sister, a teacher they had in 5th grade. For most of them, I embody some kind of dappled past, an idle projection of something that isn’t present or immediate anymore. This used to bother me, perhaps because I harbor vain illusions of originality. Someone would ask me why I ignored them in Philly the other day but when it became clear that it wasn’t me and I hadn’t been in Philly all week, they’d say, “Oh my god they look just like you!” and I’d feel a little despondent after, the sad sigh of being another face,when all along you had thought your face was yours only. Rather, there are hundreds of other people that look like me, walking all over the streets, ignoring greetings from strangers left and right.
I once got into a conversation about this while waiting on a table, because she had said, “This is going to sound weird, but you kind of look like my brother-in-law.” I laughed a dismissive “I-get-that-all-the-time” but she continued to look at me. “That’s why it’s so weird though, because he does too! People are always mistaking him for someone else. Honestly I think it’s the eyes, you both have such big eyes!”
I’ve read somewhere before that we instinctually trust faces with large eyes more, or at least more quickly. I’m not sure if this is a true scientific fact, or why it would be the case, but I have always felt that it’s something about a detectable human-ness. Small eyes are always described as “beady” or “hawkish”, denoting predatory characteristics, even an “Otherness” of species, rather than the gooey vulnerability of babies, cows, and other creatures with hot, mammalian blood. In my mind there is an entire evolutionary trajectory of people who developed large eyes as a survival mechanism, to lure those around them into believing that they posed no threat, and thus, could be trusted. Now the connection stands to be both conditioned and referential, as in, the non-threatening familiarity of one set of eyes transfers to the next. This connection isn’t always positive though; sometimes the eyes are an indicator of a dangerous impostor, and little red riding hoods are always on the lookout for those only gesturing at humanity.
There was a boy I knew who was trailed by that same exaggerated know-ability. We were often mistaken as related, or romantic, but all it came down to was two sets of eyes that could see each other. In most cases of looking, the looker is seeking for a reflection of their own gaze, rather than seeking the image that is before them. Examples of this phenomena of looking could be : surveying your own reflection in someone else’s sunglasses; looking at your passing visage on a glass surface, and not noticing what is beyond the glass; Skyping and only looking at your own face.
The problem with witnessing eyes that can see your own is that sometimes what you see is a wolf that has starved in the efforts to be a vegetarian. At least that was what I saw when I looked into this boy’s eyes: a hunger that was pulled taut by the need to survive by ways of fitting in with his own big-eyed semblance, a life stretched thin by the paradoxes that ruled it. Now, years later, I wonder if he too was trying to find someone else in his reflections, if when he walked past a mirror he was startled to find that he was still in it.
The older I’ve gotten the more pronounced and uncomfortable these occasions of false identity have become. After I moved to Asheville, the frequency became greater and much darker; I was no longer simply reminding people of someone they knew, but I was constantly mistaken for another woman, or so it seemed. I would be greeted as a regular in places I had never been. At first I chalked this up to good service, or southern charm, but on each separate occasion my existence as this woman became more implicit and outspoken by those around me. I would go to bars that needed memberships and I would be waved inside. They would say “It’s cool, I just saw you in here two nights ago” or “You come here all the time, you don’t need to show me your card.” Obviously I never said anything, because it seemed like a harmless and happy accident, one that I could laugh about as my friends showed IDs and shelled out their cash. Then, I started getting discounts, and special treatment, and my hands would feel ungainly at the ends of my arms. Sometimes in my peripheral vision it looked as though they had sprouted another index finger, or the nails had been painted. There was another woman here and I had her face and gestures; I was living her life.
She was clearly well liked, but was I ruining that for her? Was she walking around mistaken for me and feeling miserable? I felt an imperative to emulate her kindness, to keep her life above water so that if ever she could come back, she wouldn’t drown, but my tide walls were getting washed away.
Everything I did became a question of her. Sleepless, online shopping in bed, I would wonder if she was doing that too, or if she ever did. What kinds of things did she buy, what was she looking for? At night, did she turn the brightness down so that her partner wouldn’t be disturbed? Every book I read was imbued with her presence, all of the ink smelled like her saliva. Around this time, I stopped writing because I couldn’t understand the sentences that were coming out, or why my hands only wanted to repeat certain words like, “who” and “somehow” and “why”. It felt, though, that this was the only way to get closer to her, to find out this woman’s life and so I cannibalized relationships to things and people, distorting my world’s dynamics for a glimpse of hers. I was burning down the house just to stay warm.
The more I thought about her, the more blind I became to my own face. I stopped recognizing myself in pictures and a few times I thought that I had caught a glimpse of her in the mirror as I passed, walking in the opposite direction.
There were moments when her absence felt unfair, even unbearable, as I slowly took over this woman’s life, and our duplicitous existence dwindled down to one.
My partner started having hauntings, or visits in the night from a woman. When she would appear to him, he would wake up and see her watching him curiously. The rooms he had seen her in were always awash in blue, a glowing manipulation of light. She wasn’t always looking at him though; he had found her a few times just staring out of the window, or sitting in the chair at my desk. When I asked what she looked like, or the expression she had on her face, he couldn’t answer. “She just looked like a woman.” Did she look upset? “No, just…curious, I guess.” I was afraid this was the woman whose face I had stolen. Had I stolen her lover, too?
My partner was frightened of her at first; he felt cautious in the night and sometimes left the lights on. His voice in my face, his hand on my shoulder, were normalized gestures in the dark, habits of something deeper than a ghost in the mirror.
I used to imagine that the woman had been pushed out of time by my unprecedented arrival in her reality, that she had taken up life in a city in between, inhabited by other duplicated souls, forfeited of life by something more corporeal, but that she would always be what remained. What if, somehow, she and my partner were always– and would always–be together? What if this was yet another version of the life they lived, but somehow their arcs were off just a little? In some reality, I worried I was the other woman.
The visitations went on for years; she followed us through houses, vacations, and moves like the threat of an illness in dormancy. Eventually though, the fear that her presence evoked wore away, and I realized my thoughts went to her fondly, almost lovingly. I wrote poems about and through her, stories of the city that she now lived in because of me; I gave her a hundred lives, magical powers, a partner that she traversed time and space to find. She gave me an image in the mirror, a ghost to hold to myself.
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eyelids diaphanous and gauzy, covering the great emptiness beneath them. you tie a string to several objects, then me, then yourself. you walk away and the string stretches out forever around you. you give me a mirror that i cannot look at. the shortest string attaches us to an urn. eyes darting, eyes surprised, eyes simply watching. we bring the urn to several rooms. we bring the urn to several rooms and give it to a giant. we trace the strings back to ourselves over and over again. we long to reach into the urn. i reach for it with cracked and ringless fingers. you lead me back to myself. we give the urn to a giant. i give the urn to you. you do not look at me but you tie knots to more things. you tie a knot on each of my fingers, on my tongue, to each eyelash, to each hair under my arm. you lead me to the things that i am attached to. you lead me back to myself. we bring the urn to several rooms and in each room we leave it. you tie a string to each of the rings on your fingers. you tie me to a blade of grass, a detached claw, a rotting apple. you tie everything and you place it in the urn. we bring the urn to several rooms and we take it with us when we leave. we bring the urn to a giant. in every room there is an urn and we approach each urn. you have your back to me each time as though you have been waiting. we poise our hands on the urn’s mouth. you tie my string to you. you lead me back to myself.
