The Map of Our Years

I was looking in the mirror this morning, trying to find a stray hair, when I noticed a new line near my eye. It wasn’t there last month. I traced it with my finger, thinking about how we spend so much time trying to smooth things over, to hide the evidence of our own history. We treat our skin like a surface that needs to be kept pristine, as if a wrinkle were a mistake rather than a record. But every line is just a place where we have lived. They are the physical evidence of every laugh that caught us off guard and every worry that kept us awake. If we were truly smooth, we would be blank pages. We would have no story to tell. I wonder, if we stopped trying to erase the marks of our time here, would we finally be able to see the beauty in the map we have drawn on ourselves?

Heron Pereira has captured this truth perfectly in his image titled The Face. It is a powerful reminder that our stories are written right on our skin for the world to see. What do you see when you look at the lines in this portrait?