Cillian Murphy’s Face
June 10, 2022 | by Sara Brenes Akerman
Artwork by Charlotte Fressilli
My goodness. I can’t stop looking at it. Just flabbergasted, really. And I know. I know the feeling will pass. Soon, I won’t remember it. Or I’ll sort of remember it—the memory incomplete, the feeling stripped of whatever had made it burrow into me and stay there a little longer than I would’ve expected. All I’ll remember is having felt it and not the feeling itself.
It’s the eyes, mainly. And the cheekbones. Or neither of these things, but rather how the sum of his features makes him look like he comes from a different realm, a world where everything is bright blue, and, somehow, fewer people die.
And his hands. His hands are beautiful.
I am surprised by the feeling. The fact of it. Schoolgirlish. Frivolous. And yet something about it is deadly serious, the way only schoolgirlishness can be. Like standing in the hall of my middle school and feeling my knees give at the sight of the boy I liked. His dad owned a pizza shop that I would sometimes go to with my family, each time my heart pounding at the thought that I might run into him. Twenty years later, I can still see him there, sitting behind the register. It’s an intensity that I can no longer experience except maybe in short bursts, a movement seen out of the corner of the eye that I’m not sure I even saw.
Cillian, like me, loves Bill Evans. “Peace Piece,” in particular. An improvisation, it was the last thing Evans recorded for his 1958 album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. It is so simple, built on the same two-chord progression that opens Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” and born of the same impossible longing. (Here’s what’s heartbreaking about “Some Other Time”: It’s about an ordinary thing that will never happen. “Didn’t get half my wishes / Never have seen you dry the dishes / Oh, well, we’ll catch up some other time.” Or, to the point, it’s about a whole life unlived, its parallel presence acknowledged and unfavorably contrasted to your own. And yet, not a fanciful life, either. Only slightly better, slightly more loving, slightly softer, and just out of reach.)
I still love “Peace Piece,” but the ardor with which I loved it once has disappeared. My love for it a combination of my love for it and my memory of my love for it.
Back when I loved it completely, I learned a number of things about Bill Evans. That he recorded an album in the dark when he was undergoing withdrawal. That once he had to play using only his left hand for a week after numbing his right arm with a needle. That when his friend and bass player Scott LaFaro died at 25, he spent weeks walking around in Scott’s clothes.
What I heard someone say once: “The hardest thing about getting older is that you lose people, and you learn, by losing them, that you can go on without them.”
Most of what I know about death and grief comes from my father dying in a car crash at 35 and feeling as a kid that I was something like debris, what was left of him. I no longer feel this way. I have gone on without him.
IMDB lists “bright blue eyes” as Cillian Murphy’s trademark, as though he means them. His eyes something he does and has gotten good at with practice. What he says: “I just use my eyes for looking through.”
I wonder who Cillian mourns, with his eyes and his hands.
I don’t like knowing this feeling will fade before it fades. It’s like that scene in Before Midnight when they wait for the sun to dip below the horizon, because it won’t be much longer. It’s almost gone. And all I can think is, “Can I keep it this time?”
For now, I’ll bask in the fullness of a feeling not yet waning and say that I am still, right now, this very moment, here and today gobsmacked by Cillian Murphy’s face.
Still there.
Still there.
Still there.
Still there.
Sara Brenes Akerman is a writer, a Cillian Murphy fan, and an aspiring Frank Sinatra impersonator. She holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU and is currently an English PhD student at WashU, where she is trying to finally finish that dissertation. She can be found on Twitter at @sarabreak.
Charlotte Fressilli is a PhD student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a collage artist and the owner of Annabelle Says Hello Card Co., an online shop where she sells prints of her artwork on sustainable stationary. She covers the floor with millions of tiny scraps of paper and smears the sink with ink and paint in her apartment in St. Louis, where she lives with her husband, Andrew, and her dog, Annabelle. She (Charlotte) can be found on Instagram at @annabellesayshellocards.
