I’m looking in the mirror, and I’m trying to decide if I’m real.
It’s not going well, if you were curious.
My eyes, they’re just not quite right. The more I look at my face, my crooked nose, my small mouth, the less I can look at my eyes, and when I look right at them, they look immediately away again without my permission.
I’ve looked for so long that my vision has become wobbly, and my face is hardly even a face anymore. It’s like looking in a mirror during a lucid dream; the harder I focus, the less I see.
My eyes burn because I keep forgetting to blink, because blinking changes things. Maybe it resets my brain for half a second, and I see the real girl, but then she wobbles and distorts again. I lift a hand to my face, thinking I can feel my own realness with my hands. Like a blind person learning the contours of someone’s face, but it’s my face, and I’m not blind.
Though in a way, I guess I am, because I’ve been looking (how long have I been looking?) and still I can’t see myself.
I use my fingers, tentative little fingertips dancing across my cheek, which feels a little fuzzy, and soft, but not like the squeaky softness of youth. Closer to the downy softness of getting older.
My eyebrows, I notice. My eyebrows look sculpted, but I know I don’t spend any time in this mirror sculpting them, tweezing or plucking or using those neat little facial razors from the makeup section at the drugstore. Those are real, aren’t they? I remember them.
I run my fingers over the thick black hairs, then again backwards against the grain, because I remember I used to hate that feeling and I want to see if it comes back, the disgust.
But it just feels like an eyebrow. Someone’s eyebrow, not mine, of course. I don’t think.
I want to make some kind of expression, so I can decipher it. If I looked confused, that would fit how I feel inside, maybe then I would feel like the wobbly girl in the mirror, maybe I would recognize her as me. But my face is slack, my expression so blank. Eyes hollow, but laser-focused on a face that is and isn’t and can’t be but has to be mine.
The temperature of my fingers on my face is colder than the skin of my cheek, I think. Am I cold? Do I feel cold? I can’t tell, not while I’m looking in the mirror. I touch my nose, and I remember hating my nose, the shape of it. But I don’t feel anything about my nose, other than that it’s a little cold too. Maybe I should turn up the heat.
If I’m real, that is. If I’m not real, what’s it matter that I’m a little chilly?
I think I want to step away from the mirror, but it’s like I can’t remember how. I can’t take my eyes off of my (my?) reflection long enough to see what’s behind me, what’s around, where to go. Am I in a bathroom? My bathroom? In a house, an apartment, a therapist’s office? How long have I been looking? How long have I been this unsure?
Uncertainty is unstable. At some point, all things either are or are not.
At what point will I decide I am or am not the wobbly-faced girl in the mirror with the cold fingers and the dark eyebrows? Maybe I’ve always been here, and there’s never been anything behind me at all. Maybe I’m neither the girl, nor the reflection. Maybe it will be decided for me, when something or someone finally comes and pulls me away from the mirror and I’m finally convinced of reality and my place within it.
Why hasn’t that happened yet?