Finding What I’ve Lost

Lately I’ve taken to gazing at my reflection in the mirror for long periods of time. I look at myself in fragments like a butcher examining pieces of meat. I decide the price to place on my individual qualities and when I finally focus back on my figure, I stand examining a stranger. Like staring too long at a word learned years ago, I take on the shape of a person I no longer know. I’m not sure at what point my features shifted to display this girl in the mirror. I don’t even know what has changed. All I know is now the sum of my parts represent something else entirely. Maybe my lips have grown plumper or the bags under my eyes less pronounced. Or maybe it’s how my features lay on my face, too big for the canvas. If I turn my head quickly I catch an echo of who I used to think I was. But that ghost no longer seems a reflection of me. And yet this girl in the mirror is also a mystery. I seem to know what I am not but not what I am supposed to be. It is hard to move forward when you only know where not to be. So instead I stand still, waiting to remember the missing link between me and her.

I think it’s been weeks since I’ve recognized my face, or maybe months. I know this didn’t happen all at once but I can’t seem to pinpoint when this began. Today I stand in front of the mirror trying to isolate the origin of my change. I noticed my left hand is shaking. I support it with my right in an act of tenderness towards myself but something feels amiss in this action. I think it is the lack of tenderness in the eyes. The eyes are vacant. I am simply a body following impulses no longer believed. I move my unsteady hand over my heart and try to seek solace in the steady pulse, this pulse, the one consistency in my years since first breath. In it there is a past that I have been trying to see as my own but only managing to capture the explicit facts of like a graph of wars fought and lives claimed, I keep missing the point. I bite my lip as I try to retrace the intricacies of what it felt like to actually live my memories. My eyes focus on the mirror. There is a concentration on the figure’s face, a mediation of sorts. I lose myself in my gaze and resurface smaller looking up at a world I was just beginning to truly see. I feel hot with too many emotions to place. Bile rising up my throat and tears pooling in the corner of my eyes as I see taunting shadows becoming more defined. Before they fully take shape, I taste blood on my tongue, metallic and warm. I stand again in front of the mirror. I smile, not particularly  in happiness but not in bitterness either. I see the eyes of a girl before she was told everything she should not be. I see the eyes of a girl I forgot was me.

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Short story by Nicole Asherah. Nicole Asherah is an artist who tries to connect people to intimate moments, feelings, and relationships experienced throughout life through her poetry, paintings, and photography.

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