Two Figures. One Journey.
I was stopped at a red light when I noticed them.
Two Muslim women sitting side by side on the back of the vehicle in front of me.
I took a photograph of them almost instinctively. Not because I knew why. I simply had a strange feeling that something was hidden within that ordinary moment …. something I couldn’t yet put into words.
There was nothing extraordinary about it.
No grand gesture…
No dramatic story…
Just two figures sitting side by side on a completely ordinary day.
And yet, long after the light turned green, that photograph kept returning to my mind.
It was only later that I understood why.
Because I couldn’t see their faces.
I could only see their eyes.
And it was within that incompleteness that something unusual happened.
When we see a human face, we tend to believe we know who we are looking at.
Within a few seconds, we create a story.
We estimate age.
Character.
Relationship.
We imagine the life of a person we have never met.
Faces give us the illusion of certainty.
The feeling that we know.
But this time, I couldn’t.
And so, instead of answers, questions appeared.
Were they mother and daughter?
Sisters?
Two women sharing the same journey?
Or was I looking at one person at two different stages of life?
At the person she once was.
And the person she would one day become.
And then something strange occurred to me.
Perhaps we do this all the time.
With other people.
And with ourselves.
We create stories from incomplete information.
We decide who we are.
Who we are no longer.
Who we should become.
As if human life were a simple story with clearly defined chapters.
But perhaps nothing of the sort exists.
Perhaps none of us is a single version of ourselves.
Perhaps we carry within us the entire history of all the people we have ever been.
The ones who believed.
The ones who lost.
The ones who survived things they rarely speak about.
The ones who had to let go of the life they thought they would have.
None of them completely disappeared.
They simply learned, over time, to live under the same roof.
Sometimes we are stopped by something we cannot explain.
A scent.
A song.
A familiar street.
A sentence overheard years later.
Or two figures sitting side by side while waiting at a traffic light.
And suddenly, we realise that perhaps we are not a single person moving through time.
Perhaps we are the entire history of all the people we have ever been.
When the light finally turned green, the cars began moving again.
And each of us continued on our own way.
But that photograph stayed with me.
Perhaps because I couldn’t see their faces.
And so I was free to imagine anything.
That they were mother and daughter.
That they were sisters.
Or that I was looking at one person at two different stages of life.
And then I realised something that has never quite left me.
Perhaps we never truly see other people.
We see only small fragments of their stories.
A few minutes.
A few sentences.
Sometimes only a few seconds.
And we fill in the rest with our own imagination.
Just as we do with ourselves.
Because perhaps the greatest illusion of human life is not the belief that we know others.
Perhaps it is the belief that we know ourselves completely.
And yet we change.
We grow.
We lose.
We begin again.
And throughout all those transformations, we try to hold on to the feeling that we are still the same person.
Perhaps this is what it means to be human.
Not that we have all the answers.
But that, despite all the changes, we never stop getting to know ourselves.
When I stood at that red light, I thought I had photographed two women sitting on the back of a vehicle.
Today, I’m not entirely sure.
Perhaps, for a brief moment, I caught a glimpse of something that belongs to all of us.
That none of us is a single story.
That we carry within us the entire history of all the people we have ever been.
And that most of them will remain forever invisible to others.
Perhaps I didn’t photograph two women at that red light.
Perhaps, for a brief moment, I simply caught a glimpse of all the people we have ever been.
And if you’ve made it this far… thank you.
Perhaps today, for a brief moment, we remembered that none of us is a single story.
Dedicated to all the versions of ourselves that, despite everything, never stopped searching.🤍
What stayed with me was the moment when the two figures stopped being two people and became something that belongs to all of us. Sometimes an ordinary moment is enough to remind us that many lives, many versions, many stories continue walking together within us.
this made me think about how quickly we create stories about others and how little we sometimes understand ourselves. Beautifully written. The line about living under one roof was unforgettable💕