The Face You'll Never See

There is a face you will never see.

You look for it in mirrors. In photographs. In the reflection of a shop window, catching a glimpse of yourself as you walk by.

But you will never really know what you look like when you forget someone is watching.

You know every detail of your face. A tiny mole. The curve of an eyebrow.

And yet, the expressions that are most truly yours are the ones you never see. How do your eyes change when you’re happy? How do you smile at someone you’ve missed? What does your face look like when you’re listening to someone you love?

We are a hundred faces. Or perhaps a thousand.

Every encounter reveals something in us that wasn’t there before, or something we never knew we had.

No one sees us in quite the same way. No one holds a complete picture of who we are. And yet, through the eyes of others, we become a little more whole.

There is something fascinating about this mystery. One that stays with us throughout our lives.

We think we come to know ourselves by looking inward, questioning our thoughts, searching for answers. But part of who we are exists only in our connections with others. In the gestures we make without noticing, the emotions we let show, the traces we leave in the people around us long after we’ve gone.

By seeing ourselves through other people’s eyes, we discover parts of ourselves we may not even have known existed.

And I like to think that somewhere, someone carries a smile of ours, an expression, a look in our eyes that we have never seen ourselves.

Something of us that will continue to live in their memory.

Perhaps, in the end, we never entirely belong to ourselves.

Because a small part of us will always live in the eyes of others.