Face Off

I find myself in a post operative situation - in an institutional building of some kind.

I have just had an operation to switch my face with someone else's. The other person is there too - it is actually a friend of mine whom I have seen recently, though only her age feels significant, rather than who she is to me. 

The whole skin of my face and head has been swopped with hers, including a swathe of my neck too. I look in a mirror and feel the skin, tracing my hand around the edge of the operation at my neckline just below my adams apple.

There is a group of friendly people around us who comment on the face swop outcome. They say to me stuff like -

• “its amazing, your face has completely changed, but your energy signature / shape - it remains the same...
• You are still fundamentally you
• Who you are shines through this new face
• Though the surface of you is different, your essential shape / form (they are referring to the bone structure underneath now) remains unchanged.
• Who you are, it really shines through, how amazing!” 

This bit of the dream is lovely. I look in a mirror and see that what they are saying is true. The face I have been given is at least a decade and a half older than I actually am. My hair is now white and my face wrinkled. But as they say - the essence of who I fundamentally am, just shines through, and in fact is even clarified.

I look over to the other person who has received my face. Where the dream has felt spacious and full of light, now it feels dark and even more in slow motion.

I see my own face, but is is all distorted and misshapen - she looks distressed. The face is younger, younger than I am now in fact. But it is like a sock, no deeper than the skin that it is, trying to hang together in a semblance of something passable as human - and the strain of this shows in the features.

I recall reaching out to touch this face - in parts tender, but as if I might destroy it too. That which reached out felt so substantial even a second of contact - though tenderly applied - might obliterate insubstantial sock face.

I have meditated on this moment of reaching out for some days now. I cannot articulate it wholly or neatly. At its heart I find a deep deep love - as a mother feels for her daughter - and at the same time I am reaching out as the embodiment of death, reaching with fingers to contact her ...

* Sculpture by Paige Bradley, photo from http://mymodernmet.com/paige-bradley-expansion-sculpture-now-available/