Mirror-watching | Teen Ink

Mirror-watching

January 18, 2021
By ebazel1 SILVER, Chappaqua, New York
ebazel1 SILVER, Chappaqua, New York
5 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Naked, standing before the mirror, I consider myself. 

Eyes a stark hazel, their irises green and pupils circled by brown rings. A pale face speckled with red-pink bumps and skin-marks. Freshly trimmed brown hair brushed to the right, wrapping around the top of an oval-shaped head. Shoulders broadened by age and dumbbell flies but still somewhat slight; a barely-raised chest that only meagerly indents a tight-fitting shirt. A smooth belly, the button of which gives the appearance of a smile (ironic, considering gastro-intestinal troubles ensure that if the stomach were mouthed, rarely would its corners be so joyously upturned). 

Behind skin, anxiety swirls in tempests of worry, and powerful cracks of fear strike all around. Dread pollutes the air, souring oxygen as it’s inhaled and turning the exhale into a moment of respite. Questions appear, illuminating dark spaces of unknowing like lightning-bugs, showing answers, truths. Helplessly adrift, floating about is melancholy, the forlorn understanding of tomorrow and wistful memory of yesterday. Occasionally it passes through the heart, greying green-brown eyes. It lifts the mind from the moment and suspends it above them all, stealing precious now. 

The sight of me dances in the mirror, and I dance with it. An open palm with spread-apart fingers glides through the air. Blistered soles kiss the stiff wooden floor. Limbs and torso begin rhythmically flowing like an ocean’s waves. Eyelids drop, veiling vision with home’s darkness. Nothing’s seen: nothing’s thought. The air is but breathed and felt against the skin. The ground isn’t run on or from or futilely searched. The one, the separate joins all. I open my eyes and see a nakeder me; no me. Mirror-watching ceases. No reflection, no me-- just everything, the sun and the moon and the stars and the nothing in between. 


The author's comments:

take eyes off the mirror and look and see everything and nothing and smile


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