The Mirror

by Zack Wilson

I’ve got a new mirror. It hangs in a black wooden frame, large, three feet square.

If I stand shirtless in front of it, dripping after a shower or stale and undressing after another musty day at work, I can see all the signs.

My belly has thickened, despite twice weekly gym sessions the Sunday 6-a-sides. The dark thick line of my eyebrows, once a definite underlining stroke of black hair, is now yellowed and greying. My hairline is disrupted by a clear circle of thinness and reduction that has its centre two inches above my forehead. A light down grows on my ears now, it shows when the sun is behind me. The fuzz on my lower back is becoming visibly clearer, darker as a half-turn to see it makes the thickness above my hips and round my kidneys buckle and crease. The previously blonde fluff on my shoulders has now lengthened and stands erect amongst the lime-white patches of scars that replaced the livid red and septic green of the spots that once dappled my shoulders and disappeared soon after I stopped drinking. Nasal hair, scars created by glass, steel, concrete and humans, lines at the corner of my frowning eyes, creases rippling my cheeks from careless, unthinking, years ago smiles. I see all these indicators, all these signs.

It’s not just apparent in this mirror either. I hear it in my voice with its perpetual tobacco edge. I feel it in the faces and names I forget within seconds, the numbers I have to write down and the harshnesses of old blasphemies I just don’t feel anymore. I feel it on buses, listening to Tindersticks, when red-haired girls with interesting highlights and unsure, beautiful blue eyes return my glances and then alight at universities, adjusting clothes and hair, making other things part of their futures.

The mirror reflects my bed too.

* * *

You weren’t the first girl I kissed, or loved, or spent an entire night with. Yet when the question of ‘firsts’ is raised it is you I remember, your form that coagulates, your essence running through bypass channels and tunnels to be my memory, to supersede those other firsts.

The first time I saw you doesn’t matter really. But I remember the vulnerable sorrow that sat at the back of the gleam of cheap and polite delight that lit your round brown eyes. Before I first saw you naked I’d already begun to guess.

It’s you that comes to mind when people say ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’, and yet after all that guessing I never reached any kind of conclusive proof that first time, in the half-light of a university bedroom you shared with another student teacher at the thick end of a party that continued in the house next door, with the surprising feel of a coarse blanket over a drum tight sheet and the chill, exciting smoothness of the back of your thighs as I reached under your denim skirt to your hot crotch that later pressed against mine as the grey light grew through a short summer night in 1994, acoustic Nirvana in the background, guessing at each other’s outlines through almost closed eyes, not long before it all ended.

The way you laughed at me when we sat together once and I reached for you, days later, for your breast, and your cool detachment killed me as I realised the choice you’d made. The summer break-up, everyone going back to temporary jobs and parents except you who went to Manchester and never came back.

I still have your two postcards.

These memories of the beautiful intersections of so many smooth parts of you, the beautiful intersections I only touched in that grey light and never saw.

What would I see now if you shyly presented yourself to me in the yellow light of this domestic Wednesday bedroom, doors slamming like lights out signals up-and-down this winking terraced street? Would time have tanned you, engraved tight perfection with lines and grime as your own memories grew, passed and faded, deadening the gleams. Have you been brought others whom you have seen in clearly lit holiday rooms? Everyday revealings, you becoming accustomed and bored, hard work a premium in the career you chose.

Would I still see logical changes, creases at cleavage and edge of eye socket, stretch marks, stitch scars, broken vessels, broken nails, broken chords in the deeper tones of the same spring blossom laugh you used to use when you realised you were cleverer than me. What could I get in this yellow light, would it be different at dawn in a silvery garden surrounded by concrete, in the home you’ve built wherever?

* * *

The mirror reflects the whole room. Comfortable, cream coloured carpet and a black cat blinking from the end of a magenta sheeted bed.

The older head of a girl you once knew rests on its pillow. Sleeping, her hair lighter than your brunette, lightened with time and dye. Her eyes closed, sleep smoothing time’s edges away. I wonder if you would recognise us, your friends, here in our bubble of comfort, horizons drawn like evening blinds.

I offer myself now. This top half of this naked body in this mirror, through its glass I reach and step, to appear before you, somewhere in a past with the grey light of youth’s eternal future, the filtered blanket light of a bedroom in the North when we almost saw each other fully. Through this mirror I offer this changed nakedness, this aging difference, this harshness that you could always sweeten, these hairs, these scars, these changes from what I was, this nakedness, some truths. I offer you this.

I don’t believe you hear. You never did really. I step away from the mirror, get into bed, kiss my wife, and sleep.