Finding Myself In a Mirror
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I am trying to find myself in a mirror.
I lost myself when I was eighteen or nineteen. Maybe my body was changing so much that I the effort of connecting the butterfly with the caterpillar exhausted me. Maybe I thought the metamorphosis had grown to a halt and had turned away from the mirror. Maybe, as a twentysomething I had turned the gaze inwards and got caught up in the growth of my mind instead. I tried catching that perfect sardonic grin, training one eyebrow to rise, Spock-like, while the other remained stationary: the credentials and the currency of a perfect conversation over a house wine or a pot of draught. Yet my gaze didn’t travel down and I realise now that has meant the loss of a knowledge I once valued like a storyteller - knowledge I can now savour only with the distant fascination of an archaeologist. As a I child, I had understood the extension and retraction of scrapes, scabs, and sores like an hot-rod racer understands the construction of roads and the reclaiming of concrete by weeds. I would study the advancement of pumpkin vines across my father’s garden, having extended inches from the twig or rock with which I had marked their progress the previous day, and as an adolescent, the growth of hair above my lips captivated me in the same way. I approached learning to shave with the same pride as a viticulturist when pruning a vine for the first time, and while I would keep that face clear as often as I could bother to shave, I had a shield I could raise around my face at will.
Now I cannot remember how I gained a scar running along the side of my arm.
I return to my residents glistening in the late afternoon light, exhilarated from my run through suburbia, and shower in the grace of the setting sun.
It is several years since I came to metropolitan Melbourne from regional Victoria, leaving behind friends, family, and mirror. All enacted their own scrutinising yet it is the mirror’s judgements I preferred. Though I have travelled between a dozen residences, none has possessed a mirror such as my family’s. Therefore, as I return to this mirror and enact my dance for its amusement, I find myself strangely disconcerted by the synchronicity between reflection and action. I possess my torso, limbs and head - yes. Yet the movements that they conduct seem to remain another’s. Playmates - whose motions echo your own, counter your moves, shadow your sprints, retaliate to your slams, and meet you in the air halfway when you pounce - I lacked, and am probably the less for it, since maybe their movements might have taught me my mechanical limits and how to redefine those limits. Would friendships, maintained from school to adulthood have provided an essential reflection to my own growth? Yet what happens if the friendship breaks? What are the dangers of looking for yourself in a being often no less fragile than a plain of melted sand?
As a clean-skinned, seven year old, fresh from a swimming class at the local pool, I stole glances in the change rooms at the vintage genitals of the men. How - I had screamed out in my mind - could the object between my legs, no more intimidating, powerful, or useful than a water pistol, grow to the dimensions of that? In front of the crotches of men, members swung like sausages, gracefully armoured by veiny exteriors, sometimes with a foreskin helmet, and always with a pubic hair from which their penises extended like a swan’s long, muscular neck from the proud plumage of its torso.
…while so many people warned me about “growth spurt”, none warned me about the mental expansion that requiring daily markings against a metaphoric wall to keep track. Perhaps if someone had told me that all things - even genitalia - appear smaller when you grow up, that the penis would take care of itself, I would not have held those Men in such awe. Now, however, gathering my thoughts into stories, and watching the adventure of my mind unfold, I pay only a functionary attention to my unclothed body and assume the same casual, indifferent expressions of those men I had watched dry off. If before I had found fascination in the progressive growth of my facial hair, the dance of my thoughts took up all my attention, by the swinging of my emotions, by the trampoline heart that my chest struggles to contain. With great relief, I have entered a world where juggling ideas was valued over juggling girlfriends. Yet while so many people warned me about “growth spurt”, none warned me about the mental expansion that requiring daily markings against a metaphoric wall to keep track; and when I do study my groin while showering or bathing, the words of a self-check or STD-brochures are loud in my mind’s ear - Bumps or rashes? Clear - now for conditioner.
My body has become a tool I am starting to feel competent using. Its grip matches my mind, my expectations, and my hopes - and when that light (and similar light) catches me, my body makes poetry. Yet, I do not analyse that poetry - and so, it is only in moments of Zen-like contentment that I, ironically, catch a glimpse of myself.
I note in passing the foliage in the back of my legs, the phasing from grey hairs to blond hairs, like sands in a tropical river.
I feel the hardness of my thighs, and am slow to connect my sporadic jogging with such density beneath my fingers.
While chasing my sideburns past my ears with my shaver I discover a hiding mole.
An ascending snail-trail bridges the gap between pubic hair and navel over years, darkening several shades and encircling its prey. A year after spending every second day amongst various systems of weights, pullies and devices I find my arms tangled in bands of muscle.
I recall previous pauses seasons apart when I have tried to find this strange person belonging to this name and these memories - when I have tried to make him somehow belong to, or better yet to take ownership of, this body.
Bathing in winter, I find my rippling silhouette share my surprise at my aquarium body. With the joy of a nine-year-old drinking his first root beer float, I discover the sensuality of bubbles dissolving against my skin like a slow embrace through snow-jackets. I turn my arms around in the candle light before fascinated eyes. That private space above the tub becomes the dish under a microscope and my kneecaps and wrists suffer my scrutiny before being lost to the luxury of the waters.
Spring pollen brings me back to my carnal weakness of races and of tall grass.
Pauses spent on a hillside beneath summer’s stars.
In autumn, my image haunts me as I take to the streets on my bike or on foot - caught in a shop front, slipping across the windows of a car. It is a ghost resistant to capture or exorcism. It mocks every opportunity to fix it in a mirror or a camera. (Maybe this is what makes me break off every exploration of my reflection when it has barely begun - the knowledge, as I straighten the tie before an interview, or pat my scalp after a haircut, of how numerous my images and self-images are.)
I tuck in my shirt; I roll my sleeves - instantly the reflection that smiles back at me practicing confidence is a different one.
My bathroom sink retains the fragments of a beard never allowed to realise itself and shed skin covers my pillow.
I look for the “me” in the reflection of the boy or man that stares back offering only what I give it. I try to guess the trend of the protrusions of jaw, and shoulder, and ankle. I see my brothers in that trend - but only after seeing my father; our mother’s apparent femininity is all that tempers his spirit in them. The wary certainty that one day I will find the image of a dead man staring back at me beyond a few anomalous features through that looking glass drives my desire to solidify my self-image.
One brother suggested that my refusal to return to our parental home was because I was afraid of finding our father. Yet his mysticism baffled me because I feared that I would not find him and as long, perhaps, as I did not open that front door he would continue to reside there, both alive and dead for eternity like Schrödinger’s cat. My father’s optimistic smile haunts my dreams, his calm counselling weighs on every decision that I make, and the three sons that survive him embody his legacy.
When I finally return however, feeling like a pilgrim stepping into a temple, I turn the handle to the front door to find the tabernacle empty, my deity absent, and the offerings within his shrine untouched. My father must indeed be in heaven, for these four walls have failed to contain him and his memory. I walk down the side of the house and find Dad’s fernery guttered, and ask the spirit of the place whether he would have wanted this. The spirit of the place is silent - it is loyal is to its new owner and renovator, while I am but a passing pilgrim without the strength to plant his incense in the sand.
I know now where I will meet my maker. He will not come to me like a thief in the night but as a sleeper: an assassin or saboteur who slumbers in my cells. He will be a genetic time bomb waiting for my thirty-eighth birthday: the age of my father when I can first recall him. The sleeper will awake and I will stare in the mirror and find my father’s eyes looking back - questioning me, offering me hope, admonishing me, and absolving me at once.