After Image

Searing, disruptive, gravitational, the face came into focus from too far away, long before anything at that distance had a right to, monopolizing eyes. There was an audible gasp from the passersby. Or at least it felt that way. A form of disfigurement, as if someone had taken a lovely face and tampered with it until the proportions, the lines, the feeling of it were all wrong, in the way that perfection was wrong. Painful to look at. I felt sorry for her, burdened as she was with a miracle of beauty, so far out of the sphere of ordinary perception it couldn’t even be remembered. Except as a lingering of light on my retinas.