Mask

[I hadn't intended to blog, but this idea came to me and I had to jot down what I had. It's a very rough sketch of my idea, and I'll take time to refine and develop it later.]

Every person wears a mask. Everyone knows that, though some may seem not to. It's just a matter of deciding whether they'll accept another person at mask value.

Some people wear different masks for different days of the week, some for different people they meet. Some wear the same mask for days on end, some for decades. Some people fool themselves into believing that they have no mask, that what people see of them is what they really are. They're wrong of course - that's the mask they wear for themselves.

Jin wore a carefully crafted mask, and she kept it on most of the time. It had a lovely, ceramic-like quality, with delicate facial features painted on to achieve an overall effect of cold innocence. A first glance would give a casual observer an impression of a young woman just emerged from her chrysalis of girlhood, serenely unaware of the existence of human malice and not inclined to find out.

But Jin wore her mask improperly. She fooled only the most naive or apathetic of acquaintances, or those who were too self-absorbed to look too deeply into anyone else.

For all the care she put into crafting her mask, Jin neglected the most important aspect of a mask – it must fit the one who wears it, or at least appear to do so. Jin’s mask was ill-fitting, and her body did not learn how to move with the mask. She wore her mask like how a brightly-dressed circus clown would have worn a stark, solemn Noh mask.

It is an uncomfortable encounter if you should meet someone whose face never quite matches up to what their body is telling you. Jin was such a person. Few people could reconcile the tight, wary body language she subconsciously carried around with the soft, accepting impression her face gave. If you weren’t sure what to think of her, all you had to do was shake her hand.

Most people who shook Jin’s hand immediately saw the disparity between the calm, innocent face they saw and the touch they received. Jin’s hands were almost always sweaty, but they were never cold. If you extended your right hand to her, she would thrust a moist, warm hand into it, and, unlike most people with sweaty palms, she would grasp your hand tightly. While you resisted squirming out of her strange grip, you might raise your eyes to meet hers. And there, if you were sharp, you would catch a glint in her eyes that you would not have found pleasant at all, in spite of the generally innocent arrangement of her face. And if your intuition were spot-on, you might even come to think that she delighted in your discomfort in the tight, wet grip of her hand.

For in crafting her mask, Jin forgot about her eyes. A well-crafted mask can lend its effect even to the only naked part of its wearer’s face. Jin’s mask left open the windows to her soul, and she wrongly assumed that no one would look in there if they had her mask to look at. She wrongly assumed that if she kept her mask cold, innocent and beautiful, she would be able to hide from the world the gleeful malice that really lay beneath.