Hyperfamiliarity and Power Surges

My house nearly burned down and I think I know everyone

The first time I experienced Hyperfamiliarity For Faces (HFF) was at the Cape Town International Airport departures. HFF is a neurological disorder where you feel you recognize people you have never met. I looked up from my plate of breakfast and happened to catch him walking past the restaurant. He stopped, looked down at his phone, then around, changed direction, and in that time I had the urge ask him where I knew him from. But he rounded a corner and was gone. The spell was broken watching the back of him. Without seeing his face, there was nothing left about this man I could place as familiar to me at all.

I turned from the last place I had seen him, just at the corner of the walkway by the Sunglass Hut, and continued people watching. The next face I saw was also one I felt I knew. Once again the same uncanny sensation of a long-lost acquaintance rippled across my mind, this time for a woman with white curly hair and a blue blouse top. And then again, for a young woman about my age with long black hair. And then for another, this time a middle-aged man in a navy suit, looking through round, black-rimmed glasses at his phone, chewing his lip.

I knew all of these people. I couldn’t possibly tell you from where, or when, or how I had first met them, but I felt in each of their faces an echo of my past. I felt the trace of a memory where our paths had once converged. Where we had once met, before our fates bounced us away in our separate directions. But here we both were again.

In the eyes of every person I saw, weaving their way through the airport at 8AM on a Wednesday, was the same thing I feel behind mine. I don’t have an exact word for it, maybe hiraeth (homesickness for a place and time) or sonder (feeling aware of the complexity of strangers’ lives). Petit mort. Ego death. All these words get close to the feeling but are just too specific. It’s like watching everything material fade and noticing something ephemeral from each of us staying behind.

The waitress came over, asked if everything was okay, and to her too I felt I needed to say “I know you from somewhere.” I asked for the bill instead.

I haven’t experienced HFF before or since, and I don’t wish to. I also don’t know what it is about being woken up at 3:57AM by my power tripping and having to call the city’s electricity department to fix the issue that made me remember this experience of false memories I had over a year ago. Maybe it’s the voice at the other end of the line wishing me a good morning despite the unholy hour. Maybe it’s standing out on the street in my pyjamas, looking up at the nocturnal breeze dance through the now inert power lines, waiting for the city’s electrician to show up in a bakkie I feel I’ve seen before. I definitely have, but that was about a year ago, for a different issue, at a far more amenable time of day. I’ve been here before, I know myself from somewhere I can no longer conjure.

Power lines.

Could be it’s genetic memory. Maybe it’s just the feeling that inside us all is a familiar kind of electric activity, making sense of things as they happen and keep happening.

The last city electrician I called out just hours ago told me that the tripping is only surge protection, nothing to worry about. That after load-shedding the flow of current into our homes can exceed its expected range and cause damage to appliances, so the power will turn itself off to prevent this. But the power snaps on and off, on and off, every 5 seconds or some, and carries on through the night, so I’m afraid of an electrical fire starting in my sleep. I’m later told the cables were burning in my roof and that I’m lucky the house didn’t burn down. “Normally with these old houses, it only takes one spark.” Lovely.

So here I am again, waiting in the dark as the sun begins to creep up on us. Soon, I’ll hear traffic humming in the distance. At around 6:15AM a car will start on my street and reverse all the way down. I’ve never seen it but I think I know which neighbour it is, based on how many houses away its rumbling engine seems to be. Maybe this morning I’ll finally see them on their way out.

I wonder briefly if HFF is a surge in the brain. A specific lobe or region receiving too much energy too quickly with more interesting results than a lightbulb I now have to replace. This surge feels more reparative than the ones that course across a municipal power grid. They feel intentional, somehow, a type of maintenance demanded by unknown quarters of my own being, creating a cascade of imaginary recollections that fizzle out almost immediately. Making room, perhaps, for real ones to keep being made. I realize I’m happy to take fact as a side-effect of fiction. I’m content with analogues in the absence of the genuine article.

Not power lines.

A few years ago I started experiencing face blindness, the opposite problem. I struggled to recognize people I really had met, struggled to conjure up the faces of my family in my mind even when I really tried. I couldn’t even recognize my face as my own in the mirror, though that was for other reasons. Thinking on it now, the face blindness ended when the hyperfamiliarity began, not long after I accepted I had been living for years in a depersonalized state.

Hormones, transition, wrong body, blah blah blah, you know the deal by now. But it’s true that the moment I started seeing and knowing myself, I started seeing and knowing everyone else too. There’s a part of us all that’s just the same, and it’s something like a little spark.