Talking Without Lips: The Covid Quotes
The second semester of my freshman year at Geneva College was cut short by a tiny, incredibly annoying virus. So we went online in March 2020.
Sick of seeing each other through screens, in August 2020 all the returning students were glad to get back on campus and hug their roommates. I got back early to run some events to help the incoming freshmen get to know each other and us upperclassmen.
The problem: We were all wearing masks. How in the would would we learn what the freshmen looked like? How would they learn what we looked like?
The solution: Make up the parts of faces you can’t see.
I’ve been startled many a time when I see a freshman or transfer take off their mask at a meal. Either their teeth are smaller than I thought, or their nose is pointy, or they have a beard, and I can’t stop staring. I try not to, but freshmen faces are so weird.
Abby, an upperclassman like me, agrees: “It’s like, I never know how your face ends anymore. It’s always a plot twist.”
Plot twist indeed. Especially that one bearded guy I’d known for months whose beard I’d never seen.
The freshmen don’t have this recognition problem, though. I guess it comes from not knowing anyone on campus before masks were a thing. They’ve had to practice filling in the blanks for a whole campus of masked faces.
Any time someone takes off a mask, the freshmen find that their brain has correctly pieced together the puzzle of the other’s face. So much so, that their new introductory greeting is “Your face looks about as I expected it to.” They must be really good at Guess Who.
This helps prove to me that the upperclassmen have it hardest when it comes to recognizing each other. And we even spent a (nearly full) year together before the masks! We must not have spent enough time studying the stress lines and dimples on each other’s faces.
You’d think that after staring at our professors for a year we could fill their faces in when they donned a mask, but you’d be wrong. We have fallen prey to the little piece of cloth that covers all insecurities: “I forgot how big Dr. Frazier’s nose was. When he took off his mask, his nose was bigger than I remembered.” I must say, Joel’s not wrong.
We even have trouble remembering what our own classmates look like! As Gwen has said, “I know I met you before Covid, but now I finish your face differently.” And lest anyone think that she somehow had control over others’ facial features, she added, “Not that I’m God, or anything.”
We’re getting tired of wearing masks all the time and having to imagine the details of everyone else’s faces. Even the faces of people we know are starting to fade from memory.
In addition to recognition, communication with masks on is also difficult, and not only for the students who are partially deaf. We’ve all been lip-readers our whole lives, but have only realized this fact once lips have been taken away from us.
I tried to articulate this concept to my roommate one day, but all that came out was, “I never knew I could talk without lips.” That wasn’t exactly what I meant, but she got the point.
The other part of communication that’s gotten harder is reading facial expressions. Before masks, I could try to figure out what my friends were thinking. Now, I don’t have a clue. All we’ve got are eyes.
So when my roommate, Christa, was faced with a semi-hysterical friend who wanted Christa to guess what had happened to her, Christa couldn’t even try. She could only say, “It’s really hard to read your expression when all I can see are your eyes and your eyes are full of fear.” Ironically, both of them are Communication Disorders majors. They’re supposed to be fixing the communications problems of the world, not adding to them.
While we wish we could go back to seeing each other’s faces already, we continue to struggle to remember faces and communicate through these masks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll put mine back on nd go t’ dnnr whr i cn tke’t awff agin.
