Blinded

One day, her eyes clouded over and she realized that she could see no other faces in the world. She looked into her bedroom mirror, and found that hers was still as clear as day, but everyone around her were so anonymous in features that they merged into a sea of faceless faces.

She had been quite certain until then that they had all had faces. She’d never seen a person without a face before, and yet, now that she thought about it, how could she be sure that they had been there all along? Almost everyone she had ever walked past had been inherently anonymous: not a word had been exchanged, she had no insight into their deeper nature, their consciousness, those things that made each and every one of them unique. So perhaps she had just assumed their uniqueness, their faces? She had rarely looked up from the ground anyway.

Of course, as humans are social creatures, she found it very disconcerting to be the only person in the world with a face. So she spent her days wandering, on trains full of empty people. She hoped that perhaps she could find out what had happened to their faces, or whether the faces she’d believed they had were merely a trick of the memory.

As time went by, she began to give up this hope, and she would spend her days idly chattering with the only face she could find: the pretty young girl in her bedroom mirror. In every other mirror, the girl simply reflected her own movements, but in her own room, she had taken on a life of her own and become more than any friend or lover could ever mean to her. Their conversations were wonderful: they knew each other more than family, friends or lovers ever could. She knew her innermost thoughts, her dreams, her fragilities, her secrets.

One day, she said to the girl in the mirror: “It’s been said that the tragedy of human nature is that we are fundamentally alone. We can never tune into another’s consciousness, or hear their stream of thought.”

The girl in the mirror replied, her voice and her face tinged with sadness: “You know what? You’re so right. Even those people who have loved the greatest of loves, those romances that last through a lifetime… or through every lifetime… even they have never really known more than a shadow of the object of their affections.”

The girl with a face sighed. “So we will always be alone, even though our souls crave for nothing more than companionship? What a cruel joke destiny has played.”

The girl in the mirror smiled. “But not us. I know you. I know every dream you’ve ever had, every word you’ve ever wanted to say. Every time you’ve been disappointed, every time your heart has skipped a beat with joy. Destiny has not played this joke on us: we were meant to be, me and you. Come hold me, and never let me go.”

So the girl who could not see any faces but that of her true love came to the mirror, and locked her love in a deep embrace… but the girl in the mirror could not be held. She was merely a reflection, after all.

As the girl who could not see faces tried to hold onto her destiny, the mirror fell and shattered into a thousand pieces. Their love had been too fragile, too good to be true. Perhaps the destiny that the gods intended for mortals was an ironic joke, and all humans were destined to be alone in a sea of people.

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