To grow accustomed to this face

Originally published at The White Mist.

With a long-sighted father and a short-sighted mother, it was more likely than not that my brother and I would need glasses one day.  For both of us, that day came before childhood was out.  With great determination, I switched to contact lenses at fourteen, rejecting that large-lensed, plastic-framed spectacles that were the style at the time.  I wore contact lenses until I started working full-time, when glasses became more practical in the air-conditioned, eye-drying environment.

Glasses frames remain, however, subject to the vagaries of fashion, and it’s with this in mind that I’ve decided to wear contact lenses again for the wedding.  (Señor Mojito, who, like many sensible people, cannot bear to put a finger against his eyeball, will be chancing future changes of fashion and staying bespectacled.)  For the first time in many years, then, I’ve had cause to see my face from a distance without glasses.  What a strange experience.

As a teenager, I was convinced that my face was my shining badge of individuality, that no-one resembled me and I would resemble no-one.  The passing of some years reveals something rather different, however.  That round, slightly jowly oval of my face is my great-grandmother’s, soft at the jaw and narrow like an egg at the widow’s peak.  That flattening out of the cheeks around the eye socket and the nose (caused in part by wearing glasses) is also my father’s.  The wispy fringe that needs pinning or spraying not to hang flatly might have been my grandmother’s.  My eyes and mouth remain my own, but they are in a family setting.

I went today without glasses for my hair and make-up trial, a fun indulgence that I haven’t enjoyed at such length since the days of my high school ball. I am rather better at sitting still and letting others make decisions on my appearance than I was then. Without my glasses, I continued to feel as if some vital item of clothing, some key facet of identity, was missing. The ocular discipline of my teenage years hasn’t deserted me, however, since I was still able to sit still with brushes and pencils close to my eyes while colours and shapes were applied.

To get to the premises at which I needed to be demanded sunglasses, for which normally I also wear prescription lenses. I managed to find my old pair of wraparounds, which precede the current fashion for outsize lenses and thick legs. A strange sight I made, walking around town with my curled hair, my K-mart-shirt and my turn-of-the-century shades. Still, if my wedding face is to be a composite of identities, then so can be my external form in the fortnight remaining till the day.