Word After Word

I find you like this: I breathe. To find you, I have to be in my body and calm. It is, I assume, like fishing. (I haven’t fished in decades, so I am only guessing.)  I have to find a way to be satisfied with the moment just as it is, and I have to be very satisfied that when I “see” the person I am looking for, I won’t know for certain. I will make mistakes. I will think lots of people could be the person. Breathing really is the key.

So, confidently not-knowing, following, literally, behind my breath, I walk around. This is the difficult part, walking around looking at people. Everyone looks, potentially, like a person I am supposed to know, and many people seem like the person I am wanting to find/be found by. (In this way, prosopagnosia is, for me, the opposite of dating). I am watching the gait of each person while simultaneously attending to how emotions pass across the face. It’s sort of like when you watched the sky as a kid, and you saw all the shapes of the clouds, and how they moved within themselves, some parts fast, some slowly folding. You could see the sky, but you weren’t aware of it—it was the canvas or the background. So it is with the faces in a parking lot, where I’m wanting to meet up with a friend. The faces are like sky—they’re there, but they’re not what my brain pays attention to. The way the face expresses emotion—that’s what I’m tuned to.

So, this is how I find you. I see you see me. I see a face, mounted on a body that moves like yours—and the face expresses the cloud formation I know as “recognition.” I can tell, often, that someone approaching me is known to me, because they open, and create this connection. I recognize the spirit of the thing. And make a good guess. It never feels like knowing. It never feels like recognition. I’m wrong a lot. (Which feels like being stood up.) But it always, always always feels good to see someone else recognizing me. That’s what I lean into. That’s what I know.

I don’t recognize your face. I recognize recognition on your face.