mirror/mirror

Image Description: Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, with the hands separated by a hole of shattered glass. The background is dark pink-and-purple water.

It shouldn’t count, but it does.

The mirror’s grimy, coated in a thin coat of sweat and dirt and an unidentifiable stickiness that characterizes the rest of this place, this sleazy dive bar masquerading as some Manhattan lounge. If she squints through the haze of thick grape vapor and acrid tobacco smoke, she thinks she can make out pale fingerprints—foundation, or cocaine, or fucking face paint—at this point, anything’s possible.

It almost doesn’t seem like it’s meant to be a mirror. Maybe a fourth of the surface is actually reflective—the rest is distortion and filth and when she directs her eyes to the space in front of her, a smear of bright red lipstick warps the top part of her face away from the rest of her blurry body and she lets out a soft breath, grateful once again for the cottony smoke in her own head that dulls the sharp edge of irony. 

There are messages, written against the glass in dried-up Sharpie pen. Names, dates, hearts, haphazard outlines of kisses like the real thing isn’t a couple of inches up and to the right and dried against the rest of the shit that renders the bathroom into a blur. Something to remember these girls by, proof that they were real and they were here, one Friday night a week or a month or a year or a decade ago, and even if they woke up with no memory of their revelry, at least the haphazard scrawl on the mirror would prove it had happened.

She considers it, for a long moment. Dark eyes slide to her friends—now, friends is loose and possibly pushing it, because this friendship feels something like pushing together shards of shattered glass with soft hands, drawing blood so stark it could be considered beautiful in just as loose a sense—but her moment of deliberation proves just long enough to render the thought useless and there are hands on her wrist and the small of her back and the curve of her bicep and she’s being drawn into the frame of a picture and –

What is the point?

A lifetime ago, this would be a celebration of something an artist might call the divine feminine—there’s a hand on her waist and a head on her shoulder and they’re all of them heavy, laden with alcohol and indulgence and excess and something cloying and floral clings to their skin and their hair and the hollow of their throats—but it’s all cut short by the click of the camera and then they all withdraw like the tide itself, gorgeous and thankless and cold.

The picture is appropriately deposited in the corresponding group chat during the minute it takes for her to dab green-apple gloss with the pad of a ring finger onto the curve of her lower lip and languor briefly in its saccharine sweetness. She narrows her eyes at the photo, tries to make herself out in the blurry-sticky-sweaty mess of reflections but all she sees is the one who took the photo and the rest of them are just outlines, there to decorate this supposed bastion of revelry, there to decorate this idea of satiety and elegant distress.

It shouldn’t count. But it does.

/

This one doesn’t count. 

This is a dusty pink mirror, propped up against a velvety Ottoman, reflecting from the top a spread of bread and cheese and wine and the old Macbook that’s on its last leg. It’s crystal clear, cleaned regularly with attentive hands and soft fabric and a spray that smells faintly of clementines and Windex. 

It’s less of a mirror, actually. More of a window—when she’s sitting on the floor with a sheaf of papers in front of her and sunlight bathing the flat of her shoulder and the curl of her neck and she tilts her head ever so slightly to the left she can see the nook behind the dresser where the wine is tucked away next to the fig-and-olive crackers and a cheese that is soft and smoked and spicy and behind these tokens of community, of love and familiarity, a stack of Polaroid pictures capturing happiness and laughter and life. 

It’s a window, she always realises when she looks up and catches sight of a girl who is entirely different from that one that still decorates an Instagram page in the annals of the beau monde, a girl with red in her cheeks and light in her eyes.

And the window feels like it’s open now. In a few hours there will be people—people like her, people with dark eyes and set jaws who wear their grief like swords across straight shoulders, who don’t feel the need to don a shroud or recede into the shadows of their minds in order to collapse into the weightless escape of broken heels and shattered glass and technicolor oblivion.

No, these people come through the door and the mirror and the air and her heart and they settle into the sharp corners of her head and soften them, round them out so that they don’t hurt as much (without the alcohol or the smeared makeup or the chemical burn this time). These people reach for her like ivy on the wall of her childhood home and they feel more like home than home itself and isn’t that because there’s nothing to prove here?

Here, where the cartoonish mugs and burnt popcorn and scattered book bags render the scene into a distant cry from Greek art, where the mirror in the corner reflects the good and the bad and the way her smile tilts up on one side a little more than the other (an imperfection wiped away a lifetime ago by dust and sweat and broken glass) and it feels like it catches that smile and holds it, holds each one, tucks them into the carpet and the wall and the little flower-pot on the windowsill to be let in like the air and the sun and her heart.

They’ve caught her lingering on it again. A pink digital camera, a hand on her waist and a chin on her shoulder, a “smile,” and the flash goes off into an inauguration of life itself.

No, it doesn’t count. Not for anything like the shedding of obscurity through virtual applause and collapsed virtue, not for the likes and the year-later “Memories” folder or anything of the sort.

But the room smells like cinnamon and vanilla and in the morning she will remember the way the cheap string lights snagged on dregs of nine-dollar champagne, and isn’t that enough?