I Side with Myself. I Touch My Face Christopher Kondrich (bio) without realizing it, absently, hundreds of timeseach day. A human face I do not notice is there. When I touch it, I hardly registerthe sensation. In the film Onibaba, a woman fears abandonment, being leftto kill stray soldiers by herself, and so to scare her widowed daughter-in-law into staying,dons a mask. A horned mask, demonic, leering eternally. It is raining when she wears itand the rain makes it stick to her face. This is meant to be a punishment for her deception. She choosesto wear the mask, after all. She knows she is wearing it. This is why it disguises her.As I watch her claw at the mask, desperately trying to pry it from her face, I touch my own.Somewhat blemished and unshaven. A mask you do not know you are wearing is a mask that disguisesthe world. Tosses a sheet over it. Now could be anything under there. I will tell youthis. Fear is taught. You are taught what to be fearful of, as much as you can carryand not be paralyzed or so weighed down [End Page 176] that you cannot lash out or unlatchthe bedroom window as smoke seeps in below the door. Something does not need to shrinkfor it to grow smaller. As a room fills with smoke, it is relieved of habitable space.Fear is like that. It collects in the body and you have to crawl on the floor of yourselfto breathe. Thalassophobia billows dense and black above me. So too my fearof every bristle of hair on a tarantula, every millipede leg, every talonpiercing a hide, every fang, every dewclaw has been wafting steadily under the door,through the half inch needed for it to open properly. It isn't my fault. Nothing isever stricken from the record. What I fear is a record of who I am. [End Page 177] Christopher Kondrich Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for the Believer Book Award in Poetry, as well as the book-length poem Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). Recent poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Believer, Bennington Review, Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches creative writing at George Washington University and is an associate editor for 32 Poems. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College