My Name is Memory

by Ann Brashares

As you look at this stranger’s face you will be able to guess pretty accurately at age, background, and social class. And as you look longer, if you let yourself see, the subtleties will clamor to show themselves. Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes, but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception. Add to your observation the set of the head on the neck, the carriage of the shoulders, the posture of the back, and you know a lot more. These are the accumulated qualities of the soul, and they are expressed in life after life. By the time a person gets really old, the soul has worn in its body so completely that she probably looks almost exactly as she would if she had reached that age in one of her other lives. She need barely have bothered with the new body at all. Which isn’t to say that souls don’t change and evolve over time, because they do. The first time you see a familiar person in a new body is a strange and even haunting sensation, but you get used to it. You start recognizing the telltale places where the soul asserts itself: the eyes, of course; the hands, the chin, the voice. The pathos is in how much of ourselves we hold out to any passing eye that takes an interest.