There was something wrong from the very beginning but Faith chose to ignore it. Once upon a time she had been able to rely on her instincts but her mind now played tricks on her that made her question her ability to judge reality, life seemed like a representation of itself without the texture or substance that once made it genuine and the emotions of others seemed like faint hieroglyphics on a screen of flickering pixels.
It had all started 12 years earlier when she suddenly had difficulty recognising the faces of people she knew quite well. At first she tried to conceal the deficit, hoping it would resolve itself, perhaps it was some sort of temporary paralysis of the mind. Yet unless she heard a familiar tone of voice or had some other sort of visual queue to signify who someone was she was not be able to tell a friend from a stranger. Her prosopagnosia had developed virtually overnight and since that day her life had never been the same.
“Faith? Faith? It's me!” a voice with a familiar silhouette cried. He could be any one of several dozen people and deciphering which one had begun to take it's toll on her.
As a result she gradually withdrew from social life as crowds would send her into state of anxiety that could take weeks to recover from. She could only deal with one person at a time, absorbing information from conversation and body language, covering her occluded senses with social graces and a smile. After conversing with someone for an hour, if she could not determine whether or not they were known to her she would not even bother to ask, “who on earth are you?,” the omission of identity just became the pattern of her normal existence.
Over the years she gravitated towards the freaks in life, those who could be recognised many miles away by some distinguishing feature that did not rely on the contours of their face. These were the people in life whom others avoided, the social pariahs who were easy to distinguish from those considered the norm.
“Freaks are my element, these are my people. I can identify them and I can identify with them,” she thought to herself as she ventured out for a rare excursion, “everyone else seems like a blur of mediocrity. Perhaps they are.”
The sun filled the horizon with rays of electric amber as she turned the corner into the alley between her local jazz club and the garish windows of a fetish porn shop. Half a century ago the area was once a run down street of pet shops that had deteriorated into a red light district but recently it had seen gentrification subsequently followed by a quick downgrade as more up-scale seedy elements had now replaced the old ones, lending a more expensive variety to the gentrified aura of sleaze. The poverty, dirt and degradation was now upgraded to social mobility, grime and degeneration but now that it was a more stylish slum people paid good money to feel that they were part of this esoteric urban myth.
Many of the inhabitants sported asymmetrical hairstyles and brightly patterned retro shirts yet somehow they all seemed to be wearing a uniform, these were not true freaks like Faith's friends, these were disingenuous pseudo freaks trying to lift themselves above their class of banal conformists who wanted to fill the world with advertising slogans, bad graphics and the cancerous seeds of corporate corruption. Faith's affliction was a gift she thought to herself, I don't have to engage with these people because I won't be able to recognise them from day to day anyway.
“Faith, how's it going?” The statuesque rag clad figure with flowing grey dreadlocks chimed, it could only be Cecil the Rasta smiling in the midday sun. He had just married Mad Marion, a deranged poet who scrawled her work on random scraps of paper and photocopied them to distribute to the disinterested masses. These were people beyond the fringes of society, the inhabited a universe of another vibration to those around them but felt no sense of alienation whatsoever.
“Enjoying my reclusion this summer, getting a lot of writing done,” Faith mumbled half audibly.
“Good! But remember...solitude vivifies, isolation kills!!” said Rasta Cecil with a big smile on his face. He could make the darkest observations seem inspirational.
As the distant cathedral bell struck a resonant five a glistening beam of light shone through the display window onto a glowing fluorescent purple strap-on that was central to the gaudy collection of fetish paraphernalia that her Swedish ex-partner was once so fond of, leading to a misguided excursion through the shops of Amsterdam many years earlier. Faith had been celibate for three years now, in part due to trauma from this man's escalating obsession with bizarre sadomasochistic practices which had left her with internal bleeding on her last evening in Gothenberg. If she could never remember the man's face it would be through the grace of the universe but visions still ran in phases through her mind as she realised that perhaps trauma was the only thing apart from distinguishing features which could unravel the tangled neurons of her memory.
“To think of previous lovers I have to disengage myself from the concept of love, because the root of the word has never been an element of any relationship I have ever had,” Faith told her therapist.
Virtually every man she had known had treated her like a possession and a faulty one at that. Although she had specific affliction of the mind she did not have any problem with her intellect yet was still treated as though she had to be cloistered from life, somewhat like a cross between a gilded flower and a quarantined patient. She now felt that she no longer needed the complication of yet another lover without love or respect, over the years eventually all yearning had ceased and biologically it was all systems shut down. Only the emotional vacuum remained but that had always been there, regardless of the presence of one man or another through the revolving doors.
Through the window a melodious flow of sounds split Faith's stream of consciousness and for a brief moment in time she stood outside of herself. There is an out of sync symphony firing through my brain, she thought in one stream as harmonies gave rise to fragments of her mind's eye wandering far and wide. Through this vision she found herself some place familiar yet not referenced anywhere in her mental geography, a darkened room with double doors opening onto a balcony, a small circular bistro table with a white tablecloth, a vase of oriental orchids and beside it a bed on which she sat as a man in a suit from an era long gone placed a fedora on the bedside. His presence brought her to another level of reality, as if everything within her present life had been muted. This is the missing piece...this is who I am...and everything else is a house of cards, a delusion.
And there it was, the pure beauty of simplicity which did not exist in her life now, the wholeness rang in her soul with a familiarity that excavated all the layers that were the illusory concrete of her psyche. More exactly she felt that this was her real life and that so-called reality was the nightmare, she had somehow been robbed of her genuine existence by a cruel twist in the fabric of reality. Inexplicably she found herself grieving for a place she could never have been with a man she had never known.
All at once it was dissolved in the wakening of consciousness. Faith's rational thought told her that the labyrinth of imagination must be to blame, although the tears on her face were real and her nostrils were filled with the scent of the man she left.
“The clarity is too painful,” she thought, “I need to escape with the freaks.”
© Naomi C. Pattirane 2011
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