I watched a girl by candlelight last night. We were on her bed with white sheets and a white summer's blanket and with white undecorated walls. She was sitting up and I looked up at her from below while she looked somewhere off or maybe behind the candle that smelled of lavender in its burning. It was the kind of moment you don't really interrupt with speaking, only the thoughtful and middle of the night consideration of the opposite sex.

I'm not sure why I had to give the setting for this post, maybe to make it more familiar and honest but more likely to invite your memories back to similar beds and similar faces and similar nights where you're reminded how a single face can be so flooded with all sorts of humanity and at the same time impenetrable.

And so I looked up at her eyes and her lips hinged at rest and her unkempt hair slightly obscuring the tattoo on her neck. And in the flickering I saw two faces. The first one was beautiful. And in the moment it was striking like a pummel of air hitting me fully in the chest. I told her so. That I'm continuously struck by her beauty in moments that are singularities like this one. And how it's always a happy surprise when I discover it only just a little different. How beauty is never one constant but always redefining to the moment and it's the redefining that we notice.

And the light flickered and I saw another face. And this one, at once the same as the one that had just choked my breathing, was horrifying. It seemed to me in this single moment that this new face encapsulated every one that might ever exist without the tinge of beauty spectacular I had seen in the first face. It was like I was looking at her every unhappy and unbrilliant and unbeautiful future.

In the jumping light I saw her every future and how delicately it hinges between two poles. How simple we are I thought and then immediately how simple we should be.

Is there a single moment when a life turns? Or are we always already turning?

I wished I could tell her, promise her really, that her life and her face would be the first one. It would be the one that filled me with spectacular lightness and her with supernatural brilliance and not the one I saw as unending sadness. But I couldn't because then I would have to admit that I saw it there in the first place. That I saw just how fleeting our youth and beauty really is. And the way to make outer beauty and youth last is through something inside.

 As we wear these faces everyday maybe we're actually unconsciously building others that lurk slightly beneath the surface and at any single moment are capable of taking over. How then do we become sure we're wearing the one we want?