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Face | Sep 26 2001

My face Noticed again the vertical crease, perhaps three-quarters of a inch in length, that begins at the inside edge of my left eyebrow and goes up. It is the sort of crease that forms when one furrows one’s brow and that appears on either side of the vertical space defined by the bridge of one’s nose. Except that this particular crease is permanent, etched into my face by decades of furrowing. Oddly, the parallel crease on the right is half as deep and barely noticeable; evidently I furrow lopsidedly.

I only just noticed the crease a few months ago. Had I failed to notice it previously? Evidently I had, although in my defense it must have been less obvious then. I saw it when it could no longer remain unseen.

Sometime in my early twenties I discovered that my ears are different, that the left, lacking a fold possessed by the right, sticks out. For twenty-plus years I missed this. But then once I saw it I realized that I’d seen it countless times before, in mirrors and photographs, and that it had registered as unease—something about my face had always made me uneasy and here it was.