Once, while walking across a field, I sensed not the usual effort in my own body—the local straining of muscle, the adjustment of my eyes against the glare of the sun—but rather something more spectral, something less expected. I had a sense of a man walking across a field. This man was seen from a distance. The man was me. I saw myself as I would be if I were to be seen by another. I was for a brief moment no longer myself: I had become a distant vision, as though seen through binoculars, or as though I had become an unexpected character in a story I was telling. Something like this happens when a photographer lifts his camera and realizes that the boy in the viewfinder looks rather like himself as a boy.
© Fazal Sheikh © Teju Cole. All rights reserved