I must confess that my time spent gazing in the mirror, while never much to begin with, has been reduced to a quick glare in the pre dawn dark while I brush my teeth, still mostly asleep, and also once a week or so with a little hand held mirror in the shower I will look, enough at least, to razor my face back to smooth.
To the left of my computer monitor, on my giant 10 ton wooden desk, is an ancient baby blue suitcase I have propped permanently open and made into a cozy little bed for my cat Charlotte, who likes to sleep there while I write. The lid to this suitcase is propped open, with a frilly little compartment and an old chipping mirror velcro’d just above it.
As an act of meditation, and since I don’t do it often, lets have an actual studied look into the mirror together- for the first time in a long time- and check in with how we are doing. I am an old man at this point, so lets not get too excited, but why not?
The first thing of note is that my massive head takes up most of this little mirror- so I will have to draw it closer. I have an unusually large head, disproportionate to most other people, and the rest of me. Hats that are size L do not fit me. I need XL, at least.
Second thing of note is that my eyes appear quite tired and glassy, as it is just before bed and it’s been a long evening of abusing the Devil’s Lettuce. The single lamp in this room casts long shadows over their sockets up to my thick eyebrows and likewise along my wide nose ridge line. In this light my eyes look dark. Brown, or black- even though they’re hazel- but the whites twinkle enough to get me smiling stupidly at myself.
And now there’s shadows in the smile dimples.
My face opens up a bit like Jack Nicolson when I smile, and I get the dimple ripples of a man of my age- like waves in the sand, kind of, little C shaped lines- spreading across my cheeks from lips to cheek bones. And you’d never know at just a glance, after the work I had done to me when I was an adolescent, that I was missing one of my front incisors and had the canine tooth next to it filed down to impersonate it.
My lips are not particularly dry, surprisingly enough in this January drought. The rest of my face is covered in a soft layer of whiskers, well beyond prickly mode, but my lips stand out as the only feature on my face in this light that’s cast in a slightly different color. I like my lips, always have. They’re over-sized slightly without being off putting, and as a life long oral fixator and 5 star communicator, I have a very close relationship with them on many fronts.
And now I’m craving a cigarette…
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