text: Our perception of our surroundings is limited only to the senses. There are deeper ways humans can feel their way through spaces, and I have never thought to test this about the body. Facial pareidolia for instance, the way the brain constantly seeks out human-like qualities in things that don’t actually have them--There has not been a time that I have been reminded of this ability that does not put me in a state of skin crawling discomfort. No reason really why we do this, we are simply accustomed to human faces, our own faces, the faces of our mother and father. Perhaps some find solace in the presence of things that look like them. It just perplexes me how no one seems to find this phenomenon as unnerving as I do. I hate the way I am able to make out the three slits of a power outlet as two long, thin, open eyes and a frowning mouth, and how picture frames can be mounted onto a wall in just the right formation to make the wall look right at you. Looking too deep into the psychology behind this might have been why it's been keeping me up these past nights. “It was around 2:40 am.” “And what were you doing?” “I was staring at my hands and watching the room around me get big, the room was dark but light flooded under my door. I, keep them on in the hallway.” I didn’t like having to relive this. “I was making the room get darker with my eyes to help me sleep but I couldn’t. No matter how dark the room is I see them. Everywhere! there's faces, it’s like I’m being watched.” The office, fortunately, was minimally decorated and had plain walls, off white with mild yellow discoloration presumably from sun and age. It was my third appointment and around the time the afternoon bleeds into evening and I still don’t think I have communicated well enough to my therapist how frequently I see the faces. I mean there is not really a medication that can stop myself from seeing them, no amount of therapy could ever make me feel okay about seeing them. The issue is that it's just progressively gotten worse and worse that my wife is starting to worry about how I’ll be able to keep up at work with how restless I’ve gotten at this point. Everything around me just keeps getting more and more human-like. Objects started to appear with eyes that glossed over and creased on the lids with the slight bruise toned capillaries speckled throughout the surface of them. The eye slits of power outlets squinted and the frown of a mouth hole curled up at the sides and smiled almost like a pretense to how mentally torturing their existence is to me. On my drive home from the therapist I tried not to think at all. I’d close my eyes if I wasn’t behind a steering wheel. I’d close my eyes forever if the faces didn’t draw themselves there too. It was as if my brain was a projector casting the most nauseatingly, horrifying film on the screen that was the backside of my eyelids. I parked and sat inside my car for a while looking first at the front of my house, then down at my hands focusing only on my fingertips because with just a slight downward motion of the eye I’d be making eye contact with the face my watch formed with its detailing; maybe spiral again at my reflection in the surface of the glass, blending my face into the watch’s. That night my wife covered the power outlets. But I knew they were there still, I knew they wanted me to look back at them. I laid in bed on my left side, with my wife to my right behind me. I could hardly look at anything. I could hardly look at the face I’d marvel at each night before bed, I just use the time now to think about when I was still okay with it. I tossed in my sleep and so did she. I laid on my back and stared at the ceiling trying to ignore the millions of faces created by the slightest shadows in the shallow cavities in the wood but I couldn’t take it anymore. I beat at my eyes, I beat at my head I couldn't stand it. They looked just like me, millions of them like the section of stacked masks at a Halloween store but all the faces were me. “Darling, look at me.” “I can’t.” “It’s just me, it will only ever be me.” The warmth of her soft hand spread throughout the cap of my shoulder and my heart rate started to go down. She fanned the back of my neck with her other hand and spoke sweetly to me while I tried to find my breath. “Look at me.” And with a slow turn of my neck I stared myself dead into my eyes.