mirrors

A past lover called me vain because I stared at myself in the mirror a lot. (Lover is definitely a stretch considering the circumstances, but I am in control of the narrative because I have the keyboard. Take that, vile insect!)

A past lover called me vain because I stared at myself in the mirror a lot. Personally, I disagree, vanity is reserved for those who purse their lips to kiss the cold familiar glass and ejaculate praises for themselves endlessly. Semantically, I am not vain. I can be exacting about lexical semantics specifically when the words someone sloppily espouses are about me. Vanity is conscious. But, each time I pass a bathroom; I find myself pulled by the wrists inside, dragged toward the mirror to gaze at myself mindlessly. Rather than inspecting my face for new pimples, or brushing my eyebrows back into place, I look through the looking glass.

It’s easy to enter a trance state in front of the mirror. Just stare into your own eyes. They say your eyes are the window to the soul, but I posit they are a window into something much simpler. A soul contains one essence, beyond consciousness. It is the primordial quintessence of your being. Your soul transcends your physical being, it is the result of meticulous explosions of stardust combined with the universe’s billions of years of entropic decision-making. Souls can have no true windows. Your eyes are the windows of your consciousness. Each moment you are conscious, you absorb the world through your eyes.

In your irises the journey begins. Examine them, look beyond your glossy corneas and scrutinize each color in your eyes. They are not “brown”, there is a depth in that rich earth of a “brown” that is richer than the soils of the black belt. There is a red hue that is the embodiment of intensity and severity. There are miniscule bands near the circumference of your eyes which developed from the rapid growth of your eyes early in life. There may be freckles in your irises which are small clumps of melanin within your eyes, and surely there are unique patterns that spread like spilled milk throughout your eye. Your irises are as unique as your fingerprint, no government-mandated ID can truly capture them. In your irises are the unique story of your past, present and future, though you may not be able to decipher it yet.

After examining your irises, you must examine your pupils. Pupils are the beautiful darkness which absorbs the light. Notice, do your pupils expand when you look at yourself? People say that when you look into the eyes of someone you love, your pupils dilate because it is your eye’s physiological response to the releases of oxytocin and dopamine. Do you love yourself? What does it mean to love yourself and who are you? Are you the decisions you’ve made?(Explanations are not justifications) Are you the culmination of all the thoughts in your head? (Both your first throught and the corrections) Are you the person other people perceive you to be? If you don’t love yourself, when did you stop? Why didn’t you start? If you do love yourself, why? Is it for the right reasons? In the beautiful darkness of your eyes, there are more questions than answers.

Pupils can be overwhelming; it’s time to zoom out. Look at the shape of your eye. When you look at the shape of your eye, you are really analyzing the skin surrounding your eye. Do your eyes look like you father’s or your mother’s? The features of your face are a combination of every person that is geneologically connected to you. Someone must have adored this shape, or at least the lashes that surrounded it. Maybe a friend pricked a loose eyelash and made a wish centuries ago.

Oh… is that… a new wrinkle? Did your eyes always shrink so much when you smiled? Are your eyes aging you? Some may say that in your early to mid-twenties, you shouldn’t be concerned about “aging”, but aging is so daunting. The inveitability, the persistence. It is a subtle reminder that your body is not your own, it belongs to time. Time will weigh you down and grind you to a halt. How long will you witness its impact?

In the mirror it is easy to reflect on your appearance which can be admittedly shallow. But, I am not vain. I am self-absorbed.