“What just happened to me…” said a friend as he looked at me, still somewhat shocked. I braced myself because he was not someone who was easily thrown off balance. “Maybe it’s something for your column,” he added with a thin smile.
A while ago he had met a new neighbor. They’d had a nice chat at his house about small talk and fat bikes and hadn’t seen each other since.
One afternoon, a few months later, he walked up to a woman on his street who stopped him with the most asked question in the world: “How are you?” He did not know the woman, and as he considered which standard formula to use to respond, he wondered feverishly, “Who is this?”
He noticed that she knew him well enough to casually mention his first name during the conversation. He acted as if nothing was wrong, realizing that he could hardly ask: “Who are you anyway?”
They exchanged a few pleasantries and then parted ways amicably. Stunned, he continued his journey. In retrospect, didn’t she seem somewhat familiar to him, he wondered. Was it an acquaintance from a few years ago who he had never seen again? He couldn’t figure it out, cursed his failing memory – and gave up.
A while later he saw the same woman enter the apartment building next to his. Goodness, this was his chance. He walked towards her at a daring trot for his age and shouted: “Can I ask you something?” She stood there, dazed.
“I have something to confess to you,” he said. “We spoke to each other on the street the other day and I didn’t know exactly who you were, but I didn’t dare say it. I now see that you live here.”
She looked at him uncomprehendingly and asked: “But you knew that, right? That I’m your neighbor? I’ve already been to your place to get acquainted!”
He stood before her, transfixed by his astonishment. “Sorry…sorry,” he could only mumble. And then: “I really didn’t remember. Now that you mention it, I still remember that conversation at my house, very vaguely, but I had completely lost the face that went with it.”
And also for her unpleasant observation, he was well aware of that, while he formulated a few explanatory excuses out of the blue. “At your age you can perhaps expect that more often,” she said without ado. She was about twenty years younger than him. “Luckily I recognized you now,” he said as they said goodbye with a vague greeting.
At home he looked on the internet to find out what could be wrong with him. He ended up with a word he didn’t know: prosopagnosia, or face blindness, the lack of the ability to recognize faces, including those of acquaintances, sometimes even himself in the mirror. It can be congenital, but can also be caused, temporarily or permanently, by a disease (stroke, tumor, dementia) or by brain damage after an accident.
At least one in fifty people suffer from it. The question now was: was he the one too? “If I ever stop greeting you, you’ll know what’s going on,” my friend said resignedly.
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