While shaving, I cannot help but look into the mirror. Many times over the years, I have seen myself looking back at me. The face of my observer has changed quite a bit through it all, this thing we call life. The skin is looser. There are bags under my eyes many days. I can see the sagging skin beneath my chin.
~ The hair atop my head is thinning and it is flecked with grey. That same tint of grey is also prevalent in my beard and moustache. In places my hair is vanishing ever so slowly. Curiously there is hair growing elsewhere that I do not want at all.
~ Shaving has become so laborious. Not only do I have to take pains to trim my moustache, but now I have to trim my ears and nostrils. Even my eyebrows command attention.
~ Alas, this is not a picture of Dorian Gray that I gaze upon. The image staring back at me is no longer that of a youthful full-of-piss-and-vinegar man. I wonder what he is thinking, he on the other side of the glass? Is he as perplexed as I, as he looks upon my haggard visage?
~ A friend once told me that I had a face tailor made for radio. At the time, I thought it was funny. My reflection isn't laughing either. It may have been the same friend who once said I was two-faced. If I was indeed two-faced, there is no way in hell I'd be wearing this one! Once again the face in the mirror is maintaining a frown, finding nothing funny.
~ The two of us have been through a lot over the years. There was a time when our attention was directed at other parts of ourselves, not so lately. I never appreciated the reflection of the younger me. Perhaps he felt the same way. They say youth is wasted on the young. I didn't realize then that we were probably looking at each other and seeing the best of us in better times. You know, I miss that young foolish man. The things that I could tell him, I wonder if I would have listened if my likeness had said the same things to me then.
~ We were much younger then. We were invulnerable. Time was a number on a clock; nothing so esoteric as the past or the future. Then, there was only the present. Now, it is today, and it is the present that seems esoteric. The young man is not going to look back at me when I gaze into the mirror, just as he never saw the older me.
~ No, I never appreciated that bygone reflection of the younger me. I do now. I miss him. I wish he were here. I wish he were now!
~
No. 122
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1 comment:
Whoa! This is deep, man. I don't think I can shave from now in without thinking about the guy in the mirror. Great stuff!
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