The Faces We AccumulateIrisObscura on DeviantArthttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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The Faces We Accumulate

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Model  IrisObscura

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The lab hums with its unnatural stillness, light reflecting off rows of suspended faces - some mine, some borrowed, some stolen from whispers and shadows. Each one floats in its glass tomb, waiting for me to choose who I’ll be today. This is my ritual: the act of reinvention. My gloves ghost over them, pausing on a face with crow’s feet carved by laughter, then another with tear-streaked cheeks, grief fresh as rain. They’re all me - me at six, at twenty, at sixty; me as someone I’ve only imagined. The narrator remains - forever 33 - the age I stopped believing in permanence.


For 25 years, the faces accumulate, multiplying like unfinished thoughts in a cluttered mind. The lab becomes crowded, every shelf a testament to lives worn briefly but never truly lived. Each face leaves its residue, a faint impression on the fabric of me. Yet, inside, I stay the same. I am the constant in this experiment - the unchanging observer, walking the rows of my own noological museum.


But what happens when the observer is gone? Maybe I’ll die in 25 years - quietly, without fanfare, slipping out of this mortal loop. Then what becomes of the lab? Do the faces linger here, locked in an eternal pause, waiting for a hand that will never come to claim them? Does the room collapse in on itself, dissolving into the qubits of a universe too chaotic to care? Do these masks - these echoes of me - scatter like ash, seeding themselves in the noological sphere of human consciousness?


I don’t know. I walk the rows, feeling the weight of questions I can’t answer. Will the thermodynamics of this universe whisper its secrets before I’m gone, or will I fade out still guessing? Because I am dying to know.

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