The Naked (ness of the) Mayan Mask (from the series Photosyntheticism)
When he first found it, he was confounded by it. He could not get his head around the idea of a mask that revealed rather than concealed. What kind of heist were these Mayans trying to pull off? It didn’t help that he was standing in an African tourist market, thousands of miles from the Yucatan. It was Mayan for sure and it had traveled a long way to find him. So he bought it, and at the same time, it bought him.
He’d always understood that he wore masks and he assumed everyone else knew that they too had a wardrobe of masks. They wore one mask for their mother and father. They put another one on for their spouse. At work, yet a third mask was required. A fourth mask was kept for encountering old friends and a fifth was used for meeting strangers – who would surely be wearing a mask of the same variety. But it had never once occurred to him that he or anyone else sported two masks at once.
He wandered down the dusty road from the market square, and made his way towards the wooden bridge, where his car was parked. There, on the left side of the road, the doors of a church beckoned to him. He entered, leaving the bag containing his Mayan keepsake on one of the pews as he walked along the aisle to the alter. He gazed up at the crucifix that stood on a naked table, and as he did so, silence entered him. He knelt to pray, putting his hands together and closing his eyes.
And as he did so, two masks fell from his face.
