(via twentysixarias)
I’m a prosopagnosiac. Probably just like yourself, this computer has never even seen the word. The condition of Prosopagnosia…I was diagnosed as a child. I wasn’t so bad with my Mom, just because she’d always call my name, Jimmy, before I’d come bounding out to her. But my Dad was a problem. He’d never speak. He was always so quiet. I remember so many times, this strange man being in the house, and running to look for my mom—and that’s when the trouble would start, you know, cause I could never find her—and finally hollering for her. “There’s a stranger in the house!” I’d scream it. And, Jesus, how many times did that happen? Every single time I saw the guy, I’d start screaming how there was someone in the house. And this guy would just keep on sitting in our living room, reading the paper. But he’d look at me with his eyebrows high up. What are you doing? But he wouldn’t actually say it.
You have capabilities
That even you are unaware of.
You would kill for the simplest
Of things: religion, money, fame.
But you don’t even realize that you create
Plagues through the things you are trying to avoid.
The pills, the cures, the serums, the needles…
One day, the sickness will not go away.
It will only spread.
Unlike you, I was born without an age and with an identity. But, similar to you, it was not my choice to be born, nor to live out my life. She had been five when I was thought up, and she was the most darling little thing. I think this was the most fun I had with her, despite what she would say about it. She was an innocent looking child who hardly blinked her green eyes, and the radiance of them was blinding. When I ventured out in the world when she didn’t need me, I found she’d grow up to look like those women on billboards who were American Goddesses of the people, who craved to be like them, or be the ones on the billboards. She would not need to strain, I knew, to recreate such a visage in the mirror. At five years old, she was clever and imaginative—thus my birth—but also had a rather horrible case of boredom. She begged me to play games with her. I did not mind at all. I would run around the house with her, chasing her and trying to catch her feet or hands. It was strange when I saw my reflection in mirrors and metals: I was a man who was 30 or perhaps 40, and I looked like her father. I thought I would look younger, like she did, perhaps five or six. But I looked more like a parent who would chase her around for entertainment. I had fun, though, and enjoyed seeing her look back with fleeting eyes, smiling and laughing as I smiled back, teasing her and telling her I was going to catch her someday. She grew older, so fast, and by eight, she was telling her mother about me.
“What is his name?” Her mother would ask, with a play-along air.
My girl would look around, wondering herself what my name was. And she thought, with her lips pursed and her finger placed there, and finally came to an answer,
“Lampshade. His name is Lampshade.”
“Lampshade?” The mother responded, laughing. “That is a very silly name.”
I did not find it silly, since it was my name. I had changed over the course of three years, I was now younger, and I looked more like a prince from a Disney fairy tale. I liked being older more, because it made me feel as though I had fit in with the rest of the world, even though not many could see me. I smiled, though, when she looked at me to see if I had accepted the name. I nodded to her. Surely like everything else it would change in a few years. At this age, she asked me to sit with her and watch her do things, and comment on whether her dress should look like this or that…
When she was 14, she wanted me to fall in love with her. I was more different than ever, and I smoked a cigarillo, wore a suit all the time, and was 18, but looked older, because that was how she imagined me. She wanted me to fall in love with her, but I could not, because that would have made me too real. It was all a part of the great game: myself not falling in love with her would bring her everlasting entertainment. I would sit in her room and watch her do homework and draw, commenting every so often to her. One day, I found myself saying in great rebellion,
“Lampshade is a stupid name. I’d prefer that you change it.”
“You wouldn’t be yourself if you weren’t named Lampshade.”
Clever. Clever not because she was witty, but clever because that was the stuff I didn’t know right or wrong about.
“Why? Would I be different if I was named something else? I always change whether or not I have a different name.” I turned my wrist, opening my closed hand and revealing an ashtray. Tapping the cigarillo on it, I stared at her and wondered if I could change myself if I thought hard enough.
“I’m not sure. I don’t know.” She replied airily, distracted with her work.
“Well, can’t you change my name to see? You could just change it back if you don’t like me.”
She turned in her seat, impatient with me, and looked back to her work once. She had been reading a novel for school. She looked back at me.
“Holden.”
“Holden?” I echoed it, finding that it was a word or name I had never heard before. Tilting my head to the side, I smiled. “I sort of like it. Holden…”
She went back to her work, and I didn’t bother her. She would come to me and talk to me about troubles at school, and began to half believe I was there, half believe I wasn’t. She found it to good to be true to have a friend like me, someone who would listen to her and talk to her and share her troubles. When she was 16, she began to try and forget me. I wouldn’t let her. She would sit in her car, driving, and I’d lean over the seat to whisper to her,
“You have not paid attention to me in a while.” And she would smell the cigarillo, because that was what she thought she smelled. I smiled a bit. Ever since I had discovered this, it helped me discover that I would change by her thought. If she thought me as something, or remembered me as someone, she would imagine me that way. She did not answer me, as her mother was driving. She could only listen. “You won’t be able to forget me.”
You and I only know,
as we sit beside each other in rows.
Something so obvious is such a well kept secret.
But I wish you had known–
the reason the music
was so loud–was because
I wanted you to hear the song.
You just complained about it.
