Prosopagnosia

“I can’t recognize faces.”

When you were fifteen years old, your best friend cut her curly hair short, and the minute she slipped out of your sight in a crowd, you couldn’t spot her again and flew into a panic. It took you half an hour of grabbing petite brunettes, of peering at the arch of their brows and the curve of their lips, and asking “Rachel? Rachel? I’m sorry, excuse me…” before she found you. And still you had to examine her eyes, her nose, her unfamiliar hair, until she slapped your hands away, and her voice began to rise, and you had to explain.

“Prosopagnosia,” you said, and when she continued to stare, “I have face blindness, I can’t recognize faces. Usually I do okay, no one notices, no need to talk about it, but I know you by your hair and when you got rid of it, I lost you.”

When you were eighteen years old, you were asked out to have coffee by a man with green eyes in black frames. The next day on the street, he smiled at you, and you walked straight past him as he raised his hand to wave. He didn’t show up at the coffee shop that evening.

You couldn’t explain that this happened all the time, that you would have walked past your own mother unless she’d stopped you, and that he wasn’t wearing the glassed — you look for the glasses — and you would have smiled back if you had recognized him at all, and you had been so excited to have coffee.

When you were twenty years old, you promised yourself that you would know your brother and go to his table in the café without being directed. The day before, you sat down with a picture and tried to memorize the freckles and the large nose and the blue-grey of his eyes and the way his dark hair curled around his ears.

Then, standing by the entrance, with a swarm of individual features squabbling in your mind, your eyes darted between meaningless faces and you began to cry.

When you were twenty-two, you dyed your hair a violent red so you always know your handiwork in the mirror, and you can pick yourself out of a family photo, and you feel like you’re grounded, not lost, for the first time in your life.