Faces

Sometimes you see a face and just accept the emotion being conveyed as being open. Perhaps the person you gaze has caught is smiling. It may come from the twitch of a muscle near the mouth. Perhaps a bone in the cheek flexed.

A face can tell us so much. The arch of the eyebrow, the presence of “laugh” lines, these are the kind of nuances of facial features conveying who a person really is. Well it conveys this information to me and to other people of my ilk, neurotypicals. Clearly and without question my son doesn’t see these things; nor will he ever. His brain has been proven empirically per a series of MRI scans to be formed in a way that is not set up to read these cues. It is what it is.

For me reading a face isn’t about the complexion as much as it is the eyes and the mouth. Oh the complexion can tell you if the person has worked hard and thus has been weathered. Stress or the elements are a couple of causes for the aging of skin. My father’s face worked outside and worked with stressful situations. His face was as worn as an old leather jacket supple and wrinkled. His was an expressive face. The skin told you what he did. However the mischievousness or anger or confusion that is what you had to read in the eyes and the laugh lines. A complexion can also tell you if a person has sought refuge in a bottle or some other intoxicant. But skin tone can’t tell you what somebody is really all about.

For years now I have seen the above face behind the counter at the coffee shop I haunt. The image does not do her justice. It does not show the open joy she exudes in daily conversation. It does not show the love of life and the lust for knowledge she ebulliently exudes. What it does show is another human who can use her face as a canvas to tell us so much more about who and what she is.