For a few strange years, we all became half-visible. Eyes floating above cloth. Voices muffled. Smiles reduced to polite guesses. It’s wild how quickly it became normal. How easily we learned to read emotion from eyebrows and how we began to recognize each other by walk instead of smile. But when faces disappeared, writers had to start seeing people differently.
The Mask as Mirror:
A mask hides, but it also reveals. When half of someone’s face is gone, you start noticing the details that used to blur together. The way someone’s shoulders slump when they’re tired, the pause before they answer or the flicker in their eyes when they’re scared.
Writers like David L. Wade caught this shift in real time. In his collection Todling into Oblivion, poems like Masks turn that simple fabric barrier into a symbol of everything we were carrying. Fear, protection, distance and defiance. The mask became a mirror of how much we were willing to show and how much we were forced to hide. Writing in that world meant learning to see what wasn’t being said.
Language Without Expression:
We’ve always relied on faces to fill in the blanks of conversation. A smile softens sarcasm. A raised eyebrow adds irony. Take those cues away and suddenly language has to work harder. Writers found themselves doing the same. Without the luxury of expression, we started reaching for sharper words, more honest metaphors and truer tones. The page became the face, the place where emotion lived.
That’s what Wade does so well. He lets language do the heavy lifting. His words don’t perform, they confess. Each line becomes its own kind of eye contact.
The Fear of Closeness:
Masks were never just about health, they were about proximity. About how close we dared to be to one another. Writing in that climate, became a delicate balance between intimacy and safety. How do you reach into someone’s heart without crossing into their fear?
Some poets leaned into distance, turning their work into observation. Others leaned closer, writing as if the page itself could disinfect emotion. Wade threads both instincts together. His poems aren’t sentimental, they’re aware. He keeps the reader close enough to feel, but far enough to breathe. It’s empathy with boundaries.
The Unmasking:
When restrictions lifted, something strange happened. Seeing faces again felt almost shocking. We’d forgotten how vulnerable openness looks. The bare human face creased, sweating and breaking into laughter felt too honest and too intimate.
Writers felt that too. Words had been whispering behind fabric for so long that unmasking felt like stepping into bright sunlight. Suddenly, there was nowhere to hide and no metaphor strong enough to protect us from eye contact.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the lesson of the age of masks wasn’t about loss, it was about recognition. About remembering that behind every opinion, every headline and every tweet, there is still a breathing, blinking and a complicated human being.
Seeing Each Other Again:
Poetry at its core, is the art of seeing people. Not as symbols or data points, but as fragile and temporary miracles trying to make sense of things.
When Wade writes about faces hidden and revealed, he’s not just chronicling a pandemic. He’s reminding us that empathy requires effort. You have to look. You have to really look. Because whether or not the masks stay on, the real work begins when we decide to see each other again. Not as roles, not as risks, but as faces worth remembering.