This is my sister's face. I saw it for the first time in February.
My sister is 16 years younger than I am. Our visit felt like a first meeting, but also a strange kind of reunion because - here's something curious about my sister's face: it's my face.
More my face, in some ways, from certain angles, than the one sitting on my body.
It was a secret reunion because feeling smitten over surprise glimpses of a me I thought was gone seems not good. Right? I feel embarrassed saying it out loud. And yet...my face!
I didn't really know her when she lived in the mirror, when it was my job to fix and hide her. It feels like a magic gift, like slippers from enchanted mice, the chance to see this bit of me again and love her like I know how to love now: tenderly, gratefully, with awe.
It feels like bad manners, over-confidence, conceit, loving my face out loud. My before face, my current face, hatching plans to love my future face. But why? It's my intermediary, it offers itself to the world at my behest.
And it keeps leaving.
Over and over again, ever since I was born.
Do we have a plan for this?
Do we have a plan for how to love our bodies as we're born into them over and over? How to grieve our bodies as they die and reincarnate day by week by year?
I don't. And maybe I can't - maybe no plan is the only way to move in this. Still - I'd love to hold hands with you while we fall and wander through our constantly departing bodies, our constantly transforming identities.
I'd love to love your many faces, ache a little for the ones that are gone, hope to be lucky enough to meet the ones that come next. I'd love for us to do that with each other, together.
Yes?