Faces In The Trees

"Do you ever see faces in things?" I ask my husband whose back is to me.
He sighs heavily and shifts in the bed knowing that sleep would  elude him for now.
"What do you mean?" he mumbles.
"Well, I see faces in everything - like the leaves in the trees" I respond, looking into the face of a young child dancing in the trees in our backyard.
"What do you see?" he asked. "A little girl," I begin, "with ... wait, it's changing, morphing."
I watch as the face lengthens and matures. "There is a moustache and the hair is long, well it covers the ears," I correct myself, "and the hair on the ... left side of his face covers his eye slightly."
He doesn't say anything other than a soft 'hm'. I hear the sound of water and get out of bed to check that it isn't the toilet in our bathroom.
"I hear water," I say, returning to bed, "but jiggling the handle proved it wasn't our bathroom."
He shifts in the bed again. "I only hear the air conditioner." he sighs.
I climb back into bed and am captivated once again by the face in the leaves of the tree outside. It is fully developed and locked solidly into place now. A man in his late twenties with a definite air of 1974. Now don't ask me how I know this, it's just some gut feeling that I get. I note the lay of his hair, the length of his moustache. It's at times like this that I wish I could draw.
"Do you think that these faces could be people from my past or that I just have an overactive imagination?" I ask him, struggling to find missing pieces of a childhood I have no memory of.
Oh don't get me wrong, I know things about my childhood, stories told by family over the years but that is fact knowledge of a childhood spent yet lost; sketches with numerous gaps and no feelings or emotions attached. "Why overactive?" he asks.
Hmm...I ponder. I guess I just assumed that I alone saw faces in inanimate objects, faces of all ages, races, and gender, faces that haunt me in my twilight moments, in the spaces just before waking or sleeping. I hear the flush of the toilet in another room again and mention it to my husband while yelling at my dog to stop licking. I really need to find out why the sound of her licking bothers me so! My husband testily throws the covers off and I try to grab at his arm as he goes to get his bathrobe. "You don't have to check on it." Yet he leaves the room without a word.
I turn back toward the face in the tree. The eyes are captivating; there is so much care and concern there and the whole face radiates with a gentleness and ... what? love? I feel awash with something I so rarely feel, security. I snuggle deeper into my pillow, languishing in the sense of safe but as I stare into the eyes of the face I note that it is beginning to change yet again. The moustache gives way to full lips and the hair recedes revealing a large forehead. The head loses the narrowness and becomes rounder, the eyes squint and appear sinister. Evil surrounds this face and it both frightens and worries me.
My husband climbs back into the bed and I turn to him and bury my head into his shoulder. "Is the face still there?" he asks. "Yes", I whimper, "it's evil and I don't like it."