Strange face in the crowd draws closer, becomes clearer, someone you might have known in a dream. As the distance is halved, recognition is doubled, and now it might have been someone you met once, or went to school with as a child. Distance is halved again, and now this is someone you know intimately. Their thoughts, needs, and desires--you feel them all, and even though the face is strange, one you don't know well, and maybe only glanced once in a dream--that face is the face of someone supplied with complex psychological reasoning, rational motivation, and deep emotional needs.
Halve the distance one more time. Your fingers touch the nitrate backed glass. You raise your eyes slowly, lingering on nonsensical details, the strange hieroglyphic symbols on the tee shirt that you can't read but can understand, the way the shirt bundles around the neck that you can see every breath being drawn into, the way that you can see the beat of every pulse in every vein, the angle of the chin that is slightly off kilter, the teeth that are even now falling from your mouth, you lift your eyes slowly, and they meet the eyes in the reflection
::oh!::
I have to get better at remembering. I hope that it will get easier with practice. I want to know why meeting my own eyes in a dream was enough to startle me awake.
