The man of many masks
A very long time ago, in a kingdom that humanity has all but forgotten, there lived a very unusual man.
In those days, mystical and magical things such as dragons, sorcerers, unicorns and the like, were far more commonplace than they are today. Thus this man’s peculiar predicament was not entirely out of the ordinary. He had no face of his own.
He did, however, have a staggeringly large collection of masks, depicting all the many guises and expressions that another’s face would. In his lifetime he had become remarkably adept at very quickly, in fact almost instantly, swapping between his masks when the situation called for it. He would flick from furious to flirtatious, transform from tranquil to tyrannical, with the greatest ease and most immaculate timing.
His range of emotional expressions varied significantly more in fact than the average man’s as he paid far more attention to the physical interpretation of his internal emotional balance than perhaps you or I would. This being necessary for one in his situation.
He never projected an unintentional desire or accidentally revealed a deep seeded hatred, for the man of many masks was perpetually in complete control of his facial appearance.
For special occasions: the banquets thrown by the king, his own celebrations and festivities etc, our fellow would wear a warm embracing smile or an extravagant, royal and welcoming laugh. At home he would carry the peaceful face of the content master of his own land. Never in his life before had he encountered a person, place or situation for which he couldn’t choose the fitting display of his feelings toward.
Then one day when he was walking through town happily projecting his inner feeling of satisfaction and intrigue, passing the various shops in the town’s quaint little market, he tripped over a stray stone and came crashing down hard on his hands, knees, and chest.
Faster than the eye could see, his mask had been swapped into one depicting the internal feeling of pain and mild embarrassment that he now experienced. As he lay, gripping his knee and writhing in pain, a young lady who worked at the small herb shop, nearest to where he had fallen, came upon him to provide assistance.
She was the single most beautiful thing he had ever seen, or imagined to be real. Not only for her outward beauty but, in fact more so for the immense compassion, slightness and sweetness, that shone like the dazzle of a newly cut diamond from her glimmering eyes. As she held his hand and gently soothed him whilst dabbing his grazed knees with a damp cloth, he could feel the welling up of intense emotional turmoil inside of him.
His masks swapped at lightning speed from, grateful to awestruck to shy to ecstatic to embarrassed, quickly dancing through over 1000 different expressions but none could completely capture this feeling that grew ever more powerful from the depths of his very soul.
Then all of a sudden, the masks he was wearing cracked and splintered into hundreds of tiny pieces. Beneath where they had been, for the very first tine, was the man’s own true face.
As he stared into the eyes of the one he now knew he loved, he felt completely qualified, defined, safe, and more alive than ever before.
He no longer had to consider how to express what he felt inside because he knew that it would never be possible to externalise this feeling. It was so much greater than any mask, than any person, than anything else in this world.
- A short story I wrote in 2009 for a friend. I thought of it the other day and looked it up. In the spirit of publishing writing regularly till I get better at it (regardless of subject matter for the moment) I’ve edited the story a little bit and put it online. Olay!
