Interlude: wrinkles and creases

Time passes. One can let it pass, one can hope it won’t pass, one can allow the illusion to settle that its passage doesn’t affect us; but one cannot pass through time unscathed.

In every case, time, with its relentless march, always leaves its marks. Creases carved into faces by smiles, and their absence; wrinkles invisible to the eye, traced by the presence and absence of those same smiles. From wrinkles and creases, as from time’s passage, there is no escape; though some try to disguise them. It doesn’t matter if they’re genuine or false, whether they serve to show tenderness, love, cynicism, anxiety, sympathy, surprise, disgust, or empathy. Smiles, like all other grimaces, will always leave creases. The marks, the furrows carved within and invisible to the naked eye, will differ according to the types of expressions that crease the skin outside.

I observe these maps on "metro" faces, in my commute between Rato and Alvalade. The woman with deep laugh lines but empty eyes—what story do these contradictory lines tell? The young consultant (he has to be a consultant) with premature furrows on his forehead, as if he’d inherited the worries of previous generations. These are dermal maps that reveal more than their bearers would like.

Wrinkles are democratic. Money can buy many things, but it cannot buy a face without history. Celebrities and growingly more unknown transients stretch, fill, freeze, but only manage to create masks that betray their fear of time even more. It’s like trying to stop the wind with your hands or a wave with your body.

Different “tools” will be needed - like genuine interest or respect - to equip our sight so it can see beyond facial wrinkles. Only then can we distinguish the creases left by repeated joy from the furrows carved by its absence. To understand that some of the deepest wrinkles are precisely the invisible ones: those that form inside when we smile outside while crying within, when we feign surprise out of courtesy, when we keep our face neutral while the world collapses.

Time neither forgives nor lies. Each wrinkle is a sentence in a story the body insists on telling, whether we want it to or not.