The Distorted Faces

The Distorted Faces

The faces shift,
their edges melting,
eyes too wide,
mouths stretched too thin,
expressions unraveling
like wet paint
dripping from a canvas.

I try to focus,
to make them stay still,
but they do not obey.
A smile twists into something else—
too many teeth,
lips curling upward
like a puppet’s grin,
vacant and wrong.

Their eyes flicker,
pupils swirling like black holes,
pulling me in,
dragging my thoughts
into their empty gravity.
Their skin breathes,
ripples with something beneath,
something shifting,
something watching
from behind their faces.

They speak,
but their voices don’t match
the way their lips move.
Sound comes in delay,
in echoes,
in strange, stretched syllables
that don’t belong to them,
don’t belong to anyone.

I look away,
try to ground myself,
but the world is full of faces,
and none of them
are right.
None of them are human
in the way I remember.

I wonder—
have they always been like this?
Have they always been shifting
beneath their skin,
their real selves writhing
just out of sight?

Or is it me
who is unraveling,
seeing what should not be seen,
watching the world warp
through the cracks
in my mind?

Buy Me A Coffee

---

---

Today I keep thinking about faces.

Not faces as people like to talk about them—smiles, familiarity, recognition—but faces as unstable things. As surfaces that refuse to stay put. I move through the day noticing how easily they slip, how quickly the human mask loosens its grip.

There are moments when a face is no longer a face but an event. A distortion. A living canvas where expressions melt and reform without asking permission. I’ll be mid-conversation, mid-sentence even, and suddenly something is off—too many teeth in a smile, a mouth stretched just past what feels safe, eyes that hold for a second too long or not long enough. It’s subtle, until it isn’t.

I try to anchor myself. Name objects. Feel my feet. Breathe like I was taught. But the faces don’t obey grounding the way walls and floors do. They keep shifting, as if they’re being pulled from underneath by some unseen current. Wet paint running downhill. Gravity acting on the wrong things.

Sometimes the eyes are the worst part. They don’t just look back at me—they pull. Like small, contained voids. I feel my thoughts bend toward them, spiral, stretch thin. It’s not fear exactly. It’s more like vertigo. The sense that if I stare too long, I’ll fall into whatever is hollowing them out.

And then there’s the sound. Voices arriving late to their own mouths. Words lagging behind lips, syllables stretched like elastic until they don’t sound like language anymore. I find myself watching instead of listening, trying to line things up, trying to make the world sync again. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, I feel that familiar split—the place where I’m still here, but also watching myself try to be.

I look away when I can. I pretend I’m distracted. I pretend I’m tired. I pretend everything is normal because normal is easier to carry in public. But the truth is, the world is crowded with faces, and some days none of them feel right. Not monstrous—just wrong in a quieter, more unsettling way. Like mannequins warmed just enough to breathe.

What I don’t know—what I keep circling back to—is where the distortion actually lives.

Have these faces always been this fragile? Have people always been layered like this, something shifting beneath the skin, a truer self pressing against the surface, waiting for a crack? Or is the crack in me? In my perception? In the wiring that decides what counts as real and what doesn’t?

There’s a particular grief in that question. Because if it’s me, then I’m watching the world through broken glass. But if it’s not—if this is simply what lies beneath polite expressions and social scripts—then I’ve been naïve for far too long. Either answer leaves me unsteady.

Still, I write. I describe. I pin these moments to the page because language, at least, will hold still long enough to look at. Writing lets me slow the melting, name the drift, mark the place where things begin to slide. On the page, the faces don’t reach for me. They stay contained. Observable. Almost merciful.

Maybe that’s the point—not to decide whether the world is unraveling or I am, but to witness it without turning away. To say: this is what I see. This is what it feels like when reality warps at the edges. This is how it moves through me.

And tomorrow, when the faces settle back into something resembling ordinary, I’ll know it wasn’t imagined. It was lived. It passed through me. And I survived it by telling the truth about what I saw.

Even when the truth was distorted.