For 26 years, I couldn’t see faces. Now I’m seeing too many.

Picture this: you’re five years old and you just woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream you can’t even remember. With your pillow under one arm, and your favourite teddy bear, you walk barefoot down the dark hallway to your parents’ room. You climb up onto the mattress and crawl under the sheets between Mom and Dad. They hug you and whisper in your ear with their familiar, soothing voices. You fall asleep.

The next morning, you rub your eyes and open them to find two complete strangers still sleeping next to you. For every normal kid, that’s the setup for a horror movie. For me, that was just a regular morning. I’d scream in terror and kick them away when they tried to hug me and calm me down. That was my childhood. Every single morning. Every time Mom picked me up from school, and every time Dad came home from work.

See, when I was born, my brain was defective. Or, to explain it better, it was like it didn’t have time to install all the necessary software. The missing piece was called FFA – Fusiform Face Area, in the brain’s fusiform gyrus. They call it prosopagnosia, which is the fancy term for face blindness. My eyes are fine – I mean I can see things and I know what a face is and what it is made of. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears, brows.

But my brain is unable to put all that together into a recognizable identity. Surviving childhood required some creative and sometimes aggressive workarounds. My parents had to wear specific clothes and colours so I wouldn’t have a panic attack when they walked in like home intruders. Mom was a yellow jacket, even during summer. Dad was a buttoned shirt and a tie. I trusted their voices and learned the specific pitch of their footsteps.

My reality was mapped around that. Once, Dad came home in a new coat and didn’t speak right away, so I treated him like a burglar. I’d even learned to recognise the unique cadence of each person’s breathing.

The worst part? The mirror, obviously. Face blindness doesn’t mean my reflection is a smudge on the glass. Some people think it’s like a censored photo. Not at all. I could see everything, every part of my face, but I just couldn’t glue it all together like a normal person. Like a puzzle made of flesh. I spent my whole life washing a stranger’s face and brushing a stranger’s teeth, every single day.

I’m 26 now, working as a medical assistant at a clinic downtown. My social life has always been like playing a memory game. Over the years, I got pretty good at faking normalcy. Having to memorize hairstyles or the specific way a person drags their feet when they walk was exhausting. It’s like doing detective work just to say hello to someone.

For a while, I identified my best friend Sarah by the smell of her laundry detergent – until she changed it. Last month, my boss Dr Davis shaved his moustache and switched from glasses to contact lenses. I spent the whole morning asking him if he had an appointment while he stared at me like I was an idiot, before snapping and yelling at me.

There is no cure for this. No magic pill you can take to make it go away. But working in a medical building let me hear gossip about clinical trials. A colleague and good friend of Dr Davis – this neurologist on the third floor – was running experimental studies using Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or dTMS. All mixed with some new and heavy synthetic drug for the brain. And he needed volunteers – subjects for an experimental trial.

So basically, twice a week, they’d strap this magnetic… thing to my skull and flood my system with chemicals. Trying to jump-start the dead piece in my brain. Like a defibrillator. For the first few months, nothing happened except giving me massive headaches. But then, progress actually arrived when no one expected it. At the same pace as continental drift, yes, but it was happening.

One night, last November, I was brushing my teeth after dinner. I spat toothpaste into the sink, rinsed my mouth, ran a hand through my hair, and looked up at the mirror. My toothbrush clattered against the porcelain when I dropped it, but I didn’t flinch.

Inside the glass, the random features of my reflection were no longer random. I saw this guy with bags under his eyes. A slightly crooked nose, a chipped tooth from that accident during a high-school trip. Everything began to snap together and form a distinct picture. Me. That guy was me. I was looking at my face, my real face, for the first time in my life.

It was like finally meeting the person who had been driving my own body for almost three decades. My knees were about to give out. I froze and started crying. Must’ve spent an hour staring up at my reflection, unable to look away. The next week, I met Mom and saw her smile. Her real smile, not just her lips moving. What was normal for everyone else felt like winning the lottery for me.

But sometimes, when a dead engine is forced to start, it can get stuck. And after it begins to pick up speed, stopping it becomes harder and harder. My brain had suddenly become so desperate to process faces… that it decided to create them.

The first time it happened, I was cleaning an exam table at work. I sprayed disinfectant and scrubbed. As the sponge drew lines across the fake wood, the swirling grain seemed to shift. All those brown lines rotated and stretched out until they formed the screaming profile of an old man. His mouth, wide open, was like a knot in the wood. Screaming right at me.

I stepped back and almost tripped over a rolling cart. Bottles and medical instruments fell, clattering as they scattered across the floor. Sarah heard the noise and poked her head into the room.

“Nate? What happened? Did you break something?”

My finger was shaking as it pointed at the table. My breathing sounded way too loud in the room. “Is that a prank?” I asked. “Who carved that guy into the table?”

She squinted, stepped closer, and ran a hand over the table’s surface. “Carved what? It’s just a table.”

I gripped the edge of the table and swallowed hard. She frowned down at me with a mix of concern and pity.

“There’s nothing there. Just cheap brown paint,” she said.

The screaming man was still there, right under Sarah’s hand. I expected its eyes to follow me as I backed away, but they didn’t. It kept its silent scream, staring up at the ceiling. For a second, I thought I could hear it.

“Right,” I said, faking a smile as she looked at me like I was having a stroke. “Yeah, sorry. I just need more coffee.”

I dismissed it as a sudden glitch in my brain. But I had no idea that the floodgates were open. As I walked home that evening, I stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to glance at an oak tree behind a fence. Its bark was slick from the morning rain. Then, the shadows moved. The grooves in the wood shifted and rearranged into a mass of weeping faces – babies stacked on top of each other.

“Jesus!” I stumbled back off the sidewalk. A guy walking his dog yanked the leash and crossed to the other side of the street, throwing me a look like I was a freak.

By the end of the week, I was literally living in a haunted house. If I tossed a shirt on the bed, the folds in the fabric created a face sunken in the shadows. Every light in my room had to stay on until dawn to avoid the crowds of faces on the walls. I’d lie in my bed with eyes burning with exhaustion, watching the stains on the ceiling pulling themselves together into hollow eyes hovering above me.

Maybe my house was actually infested. Maybe those were ghosts, or demons. I installed a carbon monoxide detector in my apartment, and then went to buy some cheap sage. I burned it until the smoke choked me – hoping to also choke whatever entity had decided to move into my apartment.

Two days, that’s how long I lasted, before walking into the neurologist’s office. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours, my hands were shaking so badly, and the thought that I was developing early-onset schizophrenia terrified me. The doctor, to my surprise, just sat behind his desk with a completely normal and reassuring smile.

He tapped his finger against his clipboard and showed it to me.

“Pareidolia, Nate,” he said. “An aggressive form. A side effect of the therapy. Your visual cortex must be overheating.”

“I’m seeing them everywhere,” I told him. “Even in the shower. I called the priest to exorcise my place the other day, and I’m an atheist!”

The doctor chuckled. An infuriating sound. “Listen. Your brain is basically a child who just learned a new word, and now he wants to say it constantly. It is desperately looking for faces, so it finds them in the background. Your subconscious needs some time to adjust and understand that a spot on the wall is not a face. There is no ghost. No threat. Consider them simple hallucinations.”

Easy to say. But he was right. Mostly. When the alternative is losing your mind, you begin to adapt fast. So that’s what I did. And I pushed myself to speed up the process as much as possible. I forced myself through what they call exposure therapy.

Think about it. If you suffer from arachnophobia, then you force yourself to stare at pictures of spiders first. Then at real spiders. You watch them closer and closer. Maybe you even go as far as touching them. I did that.

When the curtains morphed into a grinning skull, I’d force myself to stand there and stare right into its empty eye sockets.

“It’s just fabric, Nate,” I’d whisper to the empty bedroom. “It’s not real. It’s not there.”

It became a routine – an exhausting and terrifying routine. I’d blink and rub my eyes until the skull melted and vanished. The trade-off kept me going: that magic feeling of walking down a crowded street and spotting my friend among a sea of faces without having my nervous system implode. Yes, magic, that’s the word. It was literally magic for me. And it was totally worth it.

The faces in the walls were an acceptable glitch. Just a side effect of the cure that was going to pass soon. The logic managed to keep me sane. I slowly got used to it, day after day, until things improved. Every new day, there were fewer and fewer faces where there shouldn’t have been. It held up. I held up. Perfectly.

Until the day a real face disappeared.

Sarah had been talking the whole time. She was in the middle of this boring rant about the new guy at the clinic hitting on her. I sat across from her at a table in the corner of the coffee shop, picking at a slice of strawberry cake with my fork. The steam rising from my cup looked like a ghost trying to haunt my coffee.

There was a battle going on between my own brain and me, just to be able to enjoy the afternoon. The swirl of frosting on top of the cake kept trying to arrange itself into the grotesque face of a smiling old lady. But it was okay. I forced myself to look away and focused on Sarah instead. Being able to see the makeup under her eyes and the freckles across her cheeks made me happy. The therapy was working. Who cared if the trade-off was having a phantom grandma in my dessert?

My bored gaze drifted past Sarah’s shoulder. A guy sat alone at a table on the other side of the shop, typing on a laptop. He wore this neat suit with a tie, a perfectly normal businessman outfit. His posture was flawless. But above the collar of his shirt, up to his hairline, there was… nothing.

An absolute void made of pink skin. His face wasn’t blurred, like something my brain couldn’t recognize. No. Nothing like my condition had ever shown me. And I’d studied enough to know this wasn’t how prosopagnosia worked.

For 26 years, I hadn’t been able to recognize faces, but I could see the pieces. This was something else entirely – just a smooth concavity. His skin stretched tight and smooth over the bone structure of his skull, sealing over the spaces where eyes, a nose and lips were supposed to exist. I was basically looking at a giant thumb pressed into a wall of hot wax.

As I stared, so paralyzed by the weirdness, the man lifted his coffee mug. He pressed the rim against the surface of his lower face and slightly tilted his head back. The coffee went through it. It just disappeared inside the skin where a mouth should have been. My fork clattered against the table when I dropped it.

Sarah stopped talking. She frowned and leaned across the table. “What’s wrong, Nate?” She tried to follow my gaze, turning to check behind her. “Are you still seeing faces?”

I pointed a finger past her shoulder, swallowing hard. My throat felt dry. My eyes refused to look away. “That guy. Look at that guy,” I whispered.

She twisted around in her chair. The afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows, colouring the coffee shop in orange. She squinted. “Who? The guy with the laptop?”

“Yes,” I said – my voice didn’t even sound like my own. “What happened to his face?”

Sarah turned back and her expression shifted into a mixture of worry and annoyance. “I don’t know, you tell me. He’s just a normal guy with a beard. Stop staring at people, Nate. You’re being creepy.”

A beard? No, this had to be wrong. There was no beard there. For so long I had identified Dr Davis by his moustache. Because I could see it. I could see everything. This was just a blank slab of meat reflecting the glow of his laptop screen. There was no beard, not even a mouth to grow it around.

I grabbed a napkin and wiped the sweat off my palms, nodding at whatever Sarah said next to fight the awkwardness.

“It’s just a glitch, Nate,” I whispered to myself, over and over.

A new side effect. I stared down at my cake, resisting the urge to look at that guy again. The pareidolia must have been misfiring in some nonsensical direction. Now, instead of making my brain create faces out of random textures, it decided to delete real ones. An error in my visual cortex. I repeated the logical explanation in my mind for the entire walk home, desperate to believe it.

Then, three days later, on my way home from work, I was sitting on a freezing bench at the train station. My current situation with my car was – well, let’s say my car was like the square root of a negative number, okay? So the train was my only way home from the clinic. The evening fog carried the smell of exhaust fumes. Hunched inside my coat, I killed time by mindlessly scrolling through my phone to stay warm.

Footsteps approached across the platform and stopped at the bench, with the rustle of a winter jacket. Someone sat down on the opposite end of the bench. My eyes stayed glued to my screen, focused on cute pet pictures and world news. The rails began to vibrate with the rumble of the train travelling up through the soles of my shoes. Seconds later, the sweep of headlights cut through the fog.

I slid my phone into my pocket and turned to check the almost empty platform. A casual gesture as I stood up. But my brain short-circuited. I stumbled backwards until I hit the advertisement board behind the bench. A shout tore out of my throat before I was able to control it. Guttural, like a beast’s cry.

The person sitting on the bench, two feet away from me, had no face.

Just like the guy in the coffee shop, the exact same slab of flesh without a single feature. The streetlights bounced off the smooth surface, highlighting the cavities where the eyes should have been. Then, the voice came out of nowhere.

“Whoa, hey!”

A perfectly normal voice. Calm, even. It came from him, but the skin didn’t move at all. There was no shift or even just a vibration to signal he was talking. It emanated from that hollow concavity.

“You alright, bud?” the guy said. “You look pale.”

The normalcy in his tone broke every connection in my head. Suddenly my legs felt like they were made of sand. I stood there, trapped in the cognitive dissonance of a polite question coming from something straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. My spine pressed so hard against the board I thought it might shatter.

“I’m fine,” I said, almost choking from my own saliva. Adrenaline ran into my bloodstream. I was hyperventilating. I moved, inching sideways along the board. “Just a bit dizzy. Sorry.”

“The train’s right here,” the guy said. His head tilted just a fraction of an inch, and it reminded me of an animal studying its prey.

Fuck it. I wasn’t going to stay there. I turned and sprinted across the platform, putting as much distance as possible between us. I didn’t even answer. A group of teenagers were complaining about the cold. I shoved my way past them, head down, speed-walking towards the exit and almost tripping over my own feet. Until the same voice called me.

“Hey, bud! Where you going? Weren’t you waiting for the train?” he shouted.

I didn’t know why I turned. I didn’t know turning was going to be my biggest mistake. While everyone else boarded the train, the guy just stood there. Completely still in the middle of the platform, facing my direction. And in his hands, a smartphone raised towards me like a gun.

The shutter sound of its camera echoed across the station, and I heard it even through the rumble of the train. What. The. Fuck?

I didn’t want to know what was going on, why that guy took a picture of me. I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. I took the stairs three at a time. And the thud of the guy’s boots descended them behind me. He was following me.

But he wasn’t sprinting. As I struggled to breathe, he just kept this fast-paced walk. I burst out of the station and into the parking lot. The cold air sliced down my throat and felt like swallowing shards of glass as I ran. Leaves crunched loudly under my shoes.

Before the guy could come through the station doors, I turned to the left and literally threw myself into a patch of overgrown bushes between two oak trees bordering the edge of the parking lot. I dropped to my knees in the wet dirt, covering my mouth with both hands to mask the sound of my terrified breathing.

The pareidolia didn’t leave me alone, even then. It weaponized my fear. The shadows in the branches and leaves twisted into snarling faces, all of them staring with hollow eyes, laughing at me. I clenched my teeth so hard that I tasted blood. The urge to scream was hard to resist. I tried my best and still struggled to keep myself anchored to reality, even as the real threat walked past, just yards away.

His boots crunched across the asphalt. The footsteps stopped. What came next was a heavy sigh, a sound of frustration and annoyance, reaching me through the bushes. It sounded… human. I managed to peer through the tiny gaps in the branches.

The faceless man was there, standing under a flickering streetlight, his head turning left, then right. He pulled out his phone and his thumb tapped on the screen. No one else was around.

Below me, my hands touched something half-buried in the mud. A large, broken chunk of concrete, the size of a brick. It was heavy and wet. A normal person would’ve paused to analyse the situation. The rational medical assistant I was supposed to be would have stayed hidden until the thing got bored and walked away.

Instead, I shoved myself up, lunged out of the bushes, and swung the chunk of concrete with all the adrenaline my body could generate. I hit him. I hit the side of that faceless head. The sound it made was sickening. A wet crunch of bone breaking, sounding like a hammer smashing a coconut shell.

The man collapsed without making a sound. He hit the ground like a bag of sand, his phone clattering across the asphalt. I stood over him, my chest heaving, shoulders shaking so badly as the rock – now stained with red – slipped from my fingers. Blood pooled around the man’s broken skull too fast, dark and viscous. It stained the asphalt under the streetlight.

Bile rose to my mouth, burning my throat. I fell to my knees beside him. What had I just done? My malfunctioning brain hallucinated a monster, and I had just killed a random guy because of that. I had murdered someone because I was going crazy!

I was shaking so badly I couldn’t stand up or control my hands. I reached towards the man’s jacket – I didn’t know why. Maybe to find a wallet, or anything to prove he was a real human being. As I leaned, my eyes fell on his dropped phone. The screen was scratched, but the display still active. Something was off.

I picked it up with a hand stained with mud and blood. A messaging app was open on the screen. But I didn’t recognize it. No WhatsApp or Telegram. The interface was entirely black, with lines of white text. I gasped when I saw the image hovering in the chat box.

A slightly blurry photo of me, zoomed-in on my face. On the train platform. My face was fully recognizable. And underneath the photo, he had sent a text that read:

“Subject is immune to projection. He can see me.”

As I stared at those words, struggling to process the situation, the replies started popping up on the chat, one after another.

“Do not terminate.”

“Take him alive.”

“Bring him in for dissection.”

A deafening, high-pitched ringing erupted in my ears. The world tilted violently. I hurled the phone and it hit the pole of the streetlight. It shattered into dozens of pieces of glass and plastic.

Then I ran.

I couldn’t remember the miles back to my apartment. Like a fever dream, the city around me twisted, turning into a hostile gallery of horrific faces. The cracks in the asphalt grinned at me. The headlights of passing cars morphed into furious eyes tracking my movements. And even the people on the sidewalk fused together into an amorphous mass. I shoved past them, refusing to look closely enough to see if they had faces or not.

I slammed my apartment door shut and locked it. I dragged a suitcase out of the closet and started shoving pants, random shirts, socks, underwear, everything into it. I opened an app on my phone, my thumb leaving red smears across the screen. I drained my entire credit card on an overpriced last-minute ticket departing in less than two hours.

I showered. I zipped the suitcase, then called my mom, pacing the living room.

“Nathan? It’s so late, sweetie. What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. My voice was shaking and I had to press my hand against my throat. “I just… got some time off from the clinic. Figured I’d come visit for a few weeks. Heading to the airport right now.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! You sound exhausted, by the way. Are you sick?”

“No, just a cold. See you in the morning, Mom.”

***

 

And now, I’m sitting in seat 10A, inside this metal tube. The roar of the jet engines vibrates through the window. The cabin is well lit, but some passengers are already asleep under those airline blankets.

My heartbeat is finally starting to calm down. The rational part of my brain has been trying to make its way back to the surface for the last hour. I keep repeating to myself that those phone messages must have been a hallucination too. That it was self-defence. The guy was chasing me. It was his fault. Yes.

I’m exhausted, traumatized. Fleeing across the country because an experimental trial fried my already bugged brain. A flight attendant rolled her cart down the aisle, pulling me out of my thoughts. She stopped beside me.

She smiled. She had this kind and slightly tired smile, a vibrant pink skin and beautiful blue eyes. A real face, recognizable, like a human bonfire that warmed my heart.

“Drink, sir? Or maybe a snack?”

I smiled back at her, as the knot in my stomach loosened just a bit. “No, thank you. I’m good.”

She nodded, leaned her weight against the cart and pushed it forward. As her body left my line of sight, the space behind her cleared. Sitting two rows up was a woman wearing a red dress. Blonde hair framed her empty face.

A smooth and pale concavity of waxy flesh.

I gasped – loud enough that the guy across the aisle glanced at me. I shrank back into my seat, my hands gripping the armrest as the plane took off.

The faceless woman slowly rotated her blank head towards me. She reached into her bag and pulled out a smartphone. She raised it.

Over the vibrating rumble of the jet engines, I heard the click of the camera shutter.