That is My Face
I do not have my mother’s eyes and I do not have my father’s nose. I do not laugh like my mother and I do not walk like my father. I have not inherited any propensities that the two have proven over the years to be solidly rooted within their personalities.
I do not look like my parents. On slow days, I stare at my face in the mirror and wonder where it came from. I follow the slope of my brow down the bridge of my nose. I push my hair back to examine my ears. I scrutinize my hands and examine my chin. I look for something stark, something notable, an anomaly of a feature, an indication of where this face came from.
When I look at myself long enough I eventually reach a plateau; a neutrality to my own features. The face in the mirror could belong to someone else just as much as it belongs to me. It is an odd feeling to develop a complete lack of awareness of what you look like. You lose the perception of how others view you, one you barely had a firm grasp on to begin with, because you don’t know how to discern your own self.
I walk around and wonder if my face suits me. I become unsure if the combination of my eyebrows, my lips, my nose, and my ears, makes sense.
I feel there must be some comfort in resembling your parents. You are able to trace back your origins so definitively. You can look at the ones before you and see so plainly how your face came to be. The one you walk around with everyday. The only one you know. Ah yes, I took these hands straight from my mother. The hair came from my father.
I have no sister to compare my nose to. I wonder if I did, what she would look like. Would she have my mother’s hands and would she have my father’s hair?
I track down photos of my mother from when she was my age. I look for my smile. I do not find it.
“That is my face,” I whisper to myself in the mirror. “That is my face.”