It Really is Something. To Be Able to See Yourself.
When I bought the mirror I’d sold almost all of our things.
Ten years ago I had nowhere to live, so obviously I spent fifty dollars buying a mirror. In my defense, the citron green rectangle covered in cast off McDonald’s Happy Meal toys is a one-of-a-kind, someone-else's-junk-is-another-person's-treasure situation. How could I turn it down?
Did I walk back and forth to the table that was selling it — give or take a trilliondy times? Yes, I absolutely brought all of my indecisive libra energy to the punk rock flea market that day.
After my parents divorce and mid-way through my teen years, my father bought a house with baby blue siding. Now that I really think about it, maybe it’s more like pewter. Regardless, it was next to a gravel parking lot for a closet maker and my elementary school friend previously lived in it.
She was a very nice girl, but if getting the most out of one crumpled up tissue was a trophy-earning endeavor like beauty pageants, she’d have a vast collection. Every morning on the school bus her nose would leak and she’d come armed with a single, solitary tissue rolled up into a concrete boulder; and she’d jab that thing into nostrils and my eyeballs would scream.
My friend, along with her tissue boulder, would always bring complaints to the school bus about the house and her single, waitress mother — there was never enough hot water, her mother never had enough money, her brother was annoying. This girl, and bless her she was so sweet, reached a level of middle management crankiness at twelve that I thought she was going to write her mother an action plan to go over with human resources.
My father bought the house years after Jen and I stopped our daily interactions. I kept riding the bus and she started building a nasal canyon while sitting in someone else’s car. But my father and I started living in her family’s home. Her bedroom clouds and blue sky wallpaper became mine, the popcorn glitter ceiling in the living room, the mauve window treatments, the stained navy blue carpet throughout. Yep, it was all ours.
The Henrys, except for a few outliers, are a short people. Like little Irish garden gnomes. My child towers over me, as does my husband, and it is a cruel injustice to scold a child while looking up.
Living in a museum dedicated to the people who came before me, I could never see myself in the bathroom mirror. I was all forehead and eyebrows and that’s it — for various stages of my teens, twenties and, as an elder millennial punchline, some of my thirties.
The easiest answer would have been to change the mirror, but that was the hardest thing. My father’s aesthetic is shabby totalitarian. Duct tape is an immediate family member and his guiding principle in life is why buy something new if you already have something that barely works.
When I bought the Happy Meal mirror I’d sold almost all of our things. The plan was to move to Atlanta, on a whim, and arrive in the land of boiled peanuts, Coca-Cola and Outkast with no jobs, no prospects, and the old fashioned kindness of a family who said, “You’re life is fucking nuts, come live with us.” It was at this point that I think our family wrote our mission statement: “We’ll figure it out when we get there, and then we’ll probably have to do it twice.”
Into a garage the mirror went. Then it found itself pushed into the depths of my closet when we moved back to Philadelphia. Eventually it went into a storage locker. Then I let it drown on a wall that was too big for its Command Strips. It fell, but didn’t break. For a year it sat atop my cat’s haunted house/scratch pad/cardboard box. I moved it upstairs, downstairs, into basements, and stood in front of many walls saying, “Does it work here?”
I decided six months ago (that’s about five Kanyes ago) to build the entryway to my house around it. “Entryway” makes what I’m working with sound grand. It is not, it’s about three feet of smushed together space that’s positively claustrophobic if my two-pound cat is at my ankles while I’m standing near the steps.
This weekend the mirror finally went up in my house. At a height just for me.
It really is something. To be able to see yourself.
CURRENTLY
Nightstand: Hood Feminism // Mikki Kendall
Reading: This profile of Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham is nuts // LA Times
Watching: LuLaRich // Amazon Prime
Listening: Stand For Myself // Yola // If you love Dolly + Aretha, Yola is for you
Coveting: This leopard hoodie // Torrid
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