Chapter 42

Now he reached out and touched the center of my forehead.

“That line,” he said, running his fingertip down to the top of my nose, “between your eyes. I never noticed before. I mean, it was always there, like a kind of warning. But just now, when you were looking at me, it went away.”

He spoke these last words with a kind of gentle sorrow, and I was plunged into an acute sense of the discomfort I experienced whenever I had self-awareness. The truth was, I didn’t like to contemplate myself—body or mind, for I disapproved of both, in a vague way. But now, as I struggled with understanding what he had said, I felt something new.

“How did I look without that—line?”

“Oh!” He smiled—and he had, I now appreciated more than before, a very nicesmile: pleasant, honest, simple but in a good way. At that realization I felt a yearning in my heart, a desire for that kind of innocence. It was so strong that I had to blink sudden tears away.