You create yourself from nowhere. Your own Pygmalion, you draw the lines of your face, and slowly, artistically, imaginatively, the map becomes a territory.
You create yourself from nowhere. Your own Pygmalion, you draw the lines of your face, and slowly, artistically, imaginatively, the map becomes a territory.
I stand behind you leaning on a tiled wall of the restroom, and my face reflects in the same mirror that shows you. White and black: white tiles, white matted glass in the window that is slightly open at the top, letting in a pale stream of daylight; black water pipes, black stains of old rust where the water leaks, black locks on the stall doors.
It reminds me of “Naked Breakfast”.
Your face is black and white, too, – the black eyes that shouldn’t see, and the black mouth that won’t speak.
At first the lines you draw are anatomically polite. They go where they should, comply with the will of nature, follow the paths repeated on millions of faces. The fluorescent lamps on the ceiling hum a monotone, and I watch.
I always miss the point when the reiteration becomes an emphasis. As if all the thin, tenuous lines begin to merge, pulled together by odd magnetism. They overlap, extend and expand – and suddenly the shape is strangely distorted so that the eye is a pool of blackness and the mouth is a disdainful curve.
You don’t exist before you do it – this small deviation in the picture that triggers off the changes like a rock pulls an avalanche in its wake. Without it you aren’t there, only a canvas for your own masterpiece.
Some tiles are broken around the edges, the small holes open into the space between the rooms. They are small black holes, the holes that have voices – the distant murmur of people talking elsewhere.
I’m glad the sound of their speech is here – because yours never is.
The misshapen lines of your new mouth make it unfit for human words.
I don’t know if I want to hear the words it *can* say. Deviation, a path to another place – I feel erratic and lost. I don’t want to go there.
You know it. You dip a fingertip into a can with lip-gloss and draw a red heart around one of the holes in the tiles. Perhaps, when you leave, I’ll come closer and listen to the murmur of the voices, and maybe one of them will be yours.
But I also fear that when the black lines on your face are gone, I will not recognize you.