Borrowed Faces

A Dark Little Ditty

Dragging myself free from the tangled sheets, I crawl into another morning, careful to keep my eyes from the waiting mirror. It watches from across the room, patient as the grave, eager to remind me what remains.

The day looms over me already, heavy with its familiar litany of obligations, disappointments, and little humiliations. Before I’ve even dressed, my bones ache with exhaustion. My hands tremble with the knowledge of what comes next.

I shuffle to the old oak dresser. The top drawer slides open with a sigh. They are waiting for me.

Rows upon rows of faces stare back, stacked carefully atop one another like pressed flowers or funeral masks. Their painted expressions never falter.

I run my fingers over them, tracing the familiar curves. They remember the shape of my face better than I do. Each a reflection of someone I used to be.

The first beams with impossible delight, eyebrows lifted, mouth open in carefree laughter. I remember where it came from. Summer. Saltwater. The smell of long-lost innocence clings to it in my mind. Riding freezing waves beneath a blazing sun beside a man whose name now feels almost foreign on my tongue. I cannot remember the sound of his voice anymore, nor the exact shade of his eyes. The memory has faded like an old photograph left too long in sunlight.

Beneath it rests another. The smile is smaller, restrained, but stronger somehow. The eyes are steady. The chin lifted with quiet pride. Accomplishment. Satisfaction. The certainty that life was finally becoming something worth living. Dust clings to its edges.

When I lift it, a gray film coats my fingertips. I search my mind for the moment that gave it shape, but nothing comes. Whatever gave this face its shape has long since rotted away. Only the expression remains, preserved after the memory itself has died.

One by one I turn them over. The hopeful face. The one that forgives. The one that believes.

Some are cracked. Others have grown brittle with neglect. A few I no longer recognize, though I know with dreadful certainty they all belonged to me once.

Finally, I find the one I came for. It is worn, fading, and almost smooth from use. The face was still warm, as though someone had only just taken it off.

A practiced smile rests upon its lips, not too wide, not too sincere. Just enough to reassure strangers and comfort coworkers. The eyebrows sit low in carefully measured concern. Faint shadows pool beneath the eyes. Those shadows are the only honest thing about it.

If anyone ever looked closely enough, they would see them. They would see the exhaustion. The emptiness. The shell beneath.

I lift the face and hold it before my own. It fits with a soft, wet sound, as flesh remembers flesh. The smile settles into place. When I finally dare to glance at the mirror, a pleasant stranger smiles back.

No one at work ever notices the seams. At least they never mention them.

My gaze lingers on the face in the mirror. The smile is convincing. The sort people trust without ever questioning. But I know what festers beneath it. I know the resentment buried behind the eyes, the exhaustion packed beneath the skin, the quiet contempt for another day spent pretending to be someone worth speaking to.

I wrench my eyes away before the mirror can betray me again, before it shows me the face beneath the face, the one I buried so long ago I no longer know whether it was ever mine.

The work face will not be enough today. I return to the dresser. The drawer greets me with its familiar haunting silence and stony stares.

My fingers drift over rows, each one waiting with an impossible patience. I sort through them as though leafing through an old book. Memory and emotion connect for the briefest instant before snapping apart again.

I remember carving this smile. I forget why. I remember the joy that shaped it. I cannot remember the joy itself.

My hand settles on the broad, carefree grin of childhood. The moment my fingers touch it, the room fills with the sharp scent of salt and seaweed. I hear waves breaking against the shore. Somewhere beyond them, my grandfather laughs, a deep, effortless laugh that once made the whole world feel safe.

For one impossible heartbeat, I almost remember what it was like to love being alive.

I peel away the work face. It comes loose with a damp, reluctant sound, stretching from my skin as though it would rather remain attached. Cool air kisses the flesh beneath, leaving me feeling strangely naked.

I press the smiling face of youth against my own. It fits… Poorly. The contours no longer match. My jaw has changed. My cheeks have hollowed. The smile pulls awkwardly at the corners of my mouth, as though trying to force itself onto someone else’s skull.

It isn’t simply unfamiliar. It is wrong in the way a corpse smiling is wrong. The happiness inside it has nowhere to go. The mask remembers. I don’t.

The radiant grin of childhood stares back from the body of a broken man. For a moment, I think it has worked. Then a single tear escapes from beneath the mask, winding its way across the laughing cheek.

The smile never changes. Only the man beneath it does.

I rip it from my face with a cry of frustration and hurl it across the room. It strikes the floor. Instead of shattering like porcelain, it cracks like bone. The sound echoes through the room long after it has come to rest.

I kneel before the dresser once more. Another face. The uncertain confidence of a first date. Hope disguised as charm. I lift it carefully, and immediately her perfume fills the room. Beneath it comes the smell of wind and salt rising from cliffs above a restless sea. I can almost feel her fingers entwined with mine. I can almost taste the kiss we shared before either of us knew how our story would end. Almost. The memory slips away before I can hold it.

The perfume fades. The cliffs dissolve into darkness. Her face is the first thing I lose.

I lower the mask without trying it on. At the very back of the drawer, hidden beneath all the others, waits another face. I have not touched it in years. It is twisted by a heartbreak so absolute that even looking at it makes my chest tighten.

The mirror waits. It has all the patience in the world. It neither judges nor pities. Waiting for me to witness the thing that no mask can hide. It cuts through every smile, every grimace, every carefully rehearsed expression as though they were smoke.

It watched me wear the face of perfect grief to funerals, tears running down cheeks that felt nothing at all. It saw beneath the hollow mourning to the numbness that had already hollowed me out. It watched me fasten on the face of shattered heartbreak the last time she told me she was leaving, though the man beneath had disappeared long before she walked out the door. It watched me don the face of righteous fury when they came to take away every poison I had mistaken for relief. Beneath the anger, it saw only fear.

The mirror remembers every face I have ever worn. More terrifying still… it remembers the one beneath them.

The face I was born with. The one no one else has seen in years. I no longer know whether it has become unrecognizable, or whether I have simply forgotten what it ever looked like. The mirror, I suspect, remembers.

I reach for the work mask once more. Its familiar smile settles over me with a damp embrace, hiding the ruin beneath. In an instant I become pleasant. Approachable. A stranger anyone would trust.

I step into the street among the others.

Pleasant smiles. Practiced laughter. Polite nods. Perfect faces.

None of them fit quite right.

For a moment I wonder how many of them opened a drawer this morning. How many stood before a mirror, weighing one borrowed expression against another before choosing who they would be for the day. How many have forgotten the shape of the face beneath them.

Or perhaps they are luckier than I am. Perhaps they can still bear to look upon the faces they were born with.

Then again... Perhaps they’re afraid I’ll recognize the faces they’re wearing.

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