Strange and Familiar Faces

This is not my face.  This one that looks back at me out of the mirror.

            I mean I know it is my face.  There’s been numerous counselling sessions and hand-holding, and explanations.  So I know.  But I still stand here looking at this stranger, trying to see myself in her, and failing. 

            At least the eyes, I think, should still be somehow mine.  Whatever the Picasso-like rearrangements, the carnage, the reconstruction: shouldn’t the eyes still be my eyes?  They’re the same colour, the same mundane brown, a colour roughly approximating coffee, dark enough some days that iris and pupil are almost indistinguishable.  I should find them comforting, familiar.

            That’s the roughest thing, I think – at least I think for today – that even her eyes are changed.  They’re cold eyes, cheated of their share of laughter, and bitter about it.  There haven’t been tears in them for some weeks now, but only because the urge to cry has been bundled up along with the urge to talk, laugh, sing and breath, locked up, frozen, forgotten.  They’re this other woman’s eyes, through and through.

            And the rest of her face. I run my fingers over that – the criss-cross of ropey scars, a nose too broken to fix, one cheek that’s a little bit crooked, higher than the other.  That puckered line across her forehead that puts me in mind of barbed wire, or railway tracks.  A face dyed red and purple in too many places.  This stranger, wearing my shirt, with my necklace draped around her neck, her collarbones too readily available just above the collar.

            The wallpaper is different too.  It’s too busy, and has too many shades of ice and lavender.  There’s nothing homely about this wash of cold pastels.  And yes, I know, it wouldn’t have been any good, staying in my old place, with a gold-bronze wallpaper I knew and loved.  The stairs for one thing.  That difficult kitchen.  The driveway that would need to have been walked up on these spindly, uncooperative legs.  Simply wasn’t practical.  And too big, what with him not being there anymore.

            “Don’t talk to me about that!  Just leave me alone!”

            And they’ve honoured it.  More or less.  But in the shelter of silence I think about him all the time.  I think: how could he do this? What sort of a man would abandon a woman he loved in the wake of so much pain?  In such need?  Or I congratulate him for running: at least he had the self-awareness to know when too much was too much.  Or should I breath a great big sigh of relief at having dodged that bullet: escaped a life with a man whose love and unselfishness were just so failingly small?

            “At least try to see it from my point of view…”

            And I shy away from that, afraid that at some unguarded moment that’s exactly what I will be able to see.

            “Vonnie!”

            I shrink inside. I scold myself for it.  I face that woman in the mirror – head on – and I tell her how it’s going to be: I’m back in the driver’s seat now, and she’s going to have to get used to doing things my way.  My hand trembles on the lip gloss – like fighting fire with a teaspoon of water, right?

            “You coming out?” Nita calls me.

            “In a minute.”

            But I hear her feet in the hallway.  And it’s her hallway.  Her feet have priority access.  She’s been generous to me, letting me stay here, helping me find my feet.  She’s spent weeks and months’ worth of patience, in and out of hospital, by my side with the physiotherapist.  Telling me I’m her sister, and nothing’s too much, and we’ve always stuck together, come thick or thin, and no matter what insanity the rest of the family might have heaped on top of us.

            The door opens, her head snakes around.  “Can I come in?”

            “Yeah… course.  Yeah.”

            “I like that colour on you.”  She stands with the door half open, in the same yellow shirt she wore on the night me and him announced our engagement.  Wearing that ribbon in her hair that she’s held onto since high school.  Her face is unerringly familiar.

Picture credit/discredit:  author's own work