Muristek
It’s been a year since I’ve been close to a stranger’s mouth – can I recover from ‘Zoom face’?
Our features have been obscured by masks, or viewed on screens, for months. We may never look at ourselves in the same way again, writes novelist Ruth Ozeki
Last April, I ran into a neighbour on the street. This was not a person I knew well, just someone I used to see from my window, walking masked around the neighbourhood during that first locked-down winter of the pandemic. But by spring 2021, the dangers seemed to be subsiding. People in our Massachusetts town were vaccinated and venturing outside unmasked, happy to stop and chat with anyone. It was a beautiful morning; the sunlight remaking the world so that everything looked a bit too bright and clear, as if racked into sudden and unsettling focus. And there was something unsettling about my neighbour, too. We were laughing and swapping lockdown stories, enjoying the in-person, face-to-face communion, when suddenly it struck me that it had been over a year since I’d seen a mouth belonging to someone other than my husband operating at close range.
As mouths go, this one was quite ordinary, and a year earlier, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But masking had defamiliarised mouths, turning them into something strange. This mouth was so brazenly red, its lips rubbery and wet. Inside it, I could see teeth, gums, even a tongue, and all these parts were moving. The mouth did not look like it should belong to the man’s face; it was a body part, an orifice too intimate to be on display. I couldn’t stop staring.
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