They All Wear Masks

They all wear masks that contour to their faces like second skins. Smoothing around the orbital sockets, eyeballs of various colors and patterns peering out. Wrinkles settled into creases of the plaster of forehead and laugh lines. Dimples and crows feet. They all wear masks. 

Nobody and nothing is as it seems. Their darks are deeper and their brights are blinding. The shadows stealthier. The fake skin slides up to their lip lines of perfect bows and broad smiles. The teeth within some warped and crooked to perfect and gleaming. They all wear masks.

Noses of different sizes and shapes, different colors and textures jut out from the centers of their fake faces. Some bearing imperfection, some as flawless as porcelain. They all wear masks.

Some impossibly high hawk-like cheekbones, some low and unremarkable, blending into face edges and angular ears designed to hear platitudes and bar argument and truth. Some pierced with studs, hoops, everything in between; some unmarked, but none really made to listen. They all wear masks.

It should stop there, but no, over jawlines stretch unreality, square and round lines, pointed and curved, some defined and some sporting jowls. Bonding with ears to the edges and stretching to the backs of various style hair covered skulls and down the fronts of swan-like throats and over adam's apples. They all wear masks. 

How do they breathe? How do they speak? They look so different, voices so different, words so similar. Mouths tell stories. Eyes tell lies. They all wear masks.

They're your mothers and fathers, your siblings. Your extended families and your friends and coworkers. They're acquaintances you ride the bus with, wave at in the halls and strangers you pass on the street. We all wear masks.

Can we peel them off?  

What would we find?