In my shaking hands I held a flimsy and oxidized chain. Sat dangling from its slack center was the initial M. For my name, the one diminutive letter holding both my past and present against the hollow of my throat. While I beheld my older self in the mirror, my hands looped, hitting my nape to fasten the circlet. Only to be left unsatisfied, my grasp fled to the discolored strands of my hair. Brushing their frayed and errant bits from breakouts, I smoothed them down to a soft sheet of brown silk becoming curtains along my face. Like this, I looked younger. With a wide necked shirt hung low on my left arm and precariously close to falling off my right, my collarbones announced themselves in highlights of the draining sun. The black fabric against my pallid color did no splendor aside from broadcasting the darkened circles beneath my eyes and the bereft color of my cheeks. Precisely however, I had rehearsed these steps unimaginable times today. Necklace on, hair ironed out, shirt, I would then adjust until it hung just right. And all over once more when frustration sparked and lit a fire no manner of array could allay. Longing and ever unseemly was my reflection.
But the pier glass was smudged with dirt; at the very least forging enough of a satisfactory blur to my features. I conceived the idea in which it could reshape them, mold them into something should I admire, even love perhaps. My hand wiped furiously at the makeup brushed over my face until that was a smudged thing too. As if I took an eraser to the being before me, to the person I was, the lines all blurred. I was left to merely recognize the necklace playing a part since high school and the shirt, fashioned much too large for my figure, but both befitting to the missed youth of my years. With shears and a smart of tears at bay, I began to deface my locks of hair too. One strand at a time I clipped, making a swishing sound with the metal blades as a small string was cut free. Piece by piece, more fell to the floor like the wisps of a dying dandelion. The metal felt wonderful in my fingers, liberating, as I cut weight off my head, my unsatisfied heart. Strands began fluttering around my feet as slowly I wore my hair at my shoulders. Until gradually, I had cut myself a look of straight bangs and finished it off with a puff of air, aimed to the sky, in a futile attempt to blow any stubborn remnants from my face. Through rogue strands of hair, the woman was gone and in her place of reflection was now the ghost of my younger self. A picture frame within a gilt framed mirror where she smiled back at me as if I was taking her photo for the senior year yearbook. Suddenly shifting into a movie, the glass churned with the girl who twirled, her short hair flying hastily and tapered with each spin. But now, nothing of the mirror remained and my hand felt the bemusing absence of shears. Perhaps I was dreaming, hallucinating, but certainly this could be no delusion, for I was swept up into a whirlwind beside the girl I loved but no longer knew.
Brisk was the evening as we swam under the stars. Waters cold and calming. I watched the girl tilt her head back, drinking in the night air and treading the ocean’s current with easy strokes. Like a black veil weighted with salted water, her hair floated adrift in magnificence around and under her skull. The veil dragged long and wide in the clear waters where the pearlescent moonlight, shining like a smile, found its own reflection there. Her clothes clung to her skin like a white sheet of paper saturated with water, sheer and molding. Albeit, mine could not be more dry as she dove beneath the churning waters to rise with water dripping like tears from her lashes. Crowning glorious green eyes, her eyelids lifted languidly as she studied the awe sprawled across my face. And the girl smiled a smile wet and slippery when her lips slid over her teeth and a giggle fled her lungs. All too much like a spray of salt water hitting me, her sounds of elation took away the cold, despite our naturally peaked breasts. It distracted from our legs blanketed in gooseflesh which dared to break surface with their protrusions. But we were undeterred and free of parental fetters or their fearful proclivities as we drank, like rogue teenagers, the night air like we could get drunk off it.
And then, we did. She handed me the emerald bottle, gold bracelets stacked on her wrists clinking with movement and gleaming with the golden light of sun down. Her eyes, perched above a softly sloped nose, shone bright green. However, today it seemed, they were trapped within a webbing of red woven in tiredness. Quite ostensibly, sleeplessness had chased away any wrong dreams and brought about a new kind of monster. A young girl hungry for life as she sipped from the liquor and closed her eyes against the melting saffron sun. So I smiled, took the bottle from her warm fingers and chased the liquor with a can of lemonade she must have left, worriless, sitting in the sun for the majority of the day. To our left were two french doors painted a lovely eggshell white between panned glass polished and free of marring. Although, the panes had depicted one sloppy and familiar scrawling between the upper left frame: M. The iron table, where my longer and older legs hit against its bottom, rocked when I had set the half emptied liquor on its upside. Like the pretending never ceased in youth, we drank as if we were two women having a glass of wine in France and she was wondrously drunk. But my ghost of an admiring figure was painfully aware that I was not. I would watch as she sat back, her arms splayed wide over the back of a brocaded chair, hands hanging loose and fingers rapping, all the long while she recounted the ever exalted events of her previous night. She would giggle and her shoulders would shake under the straps of her tank top. She’d cover her mouth as if concerned our imitation wine would stain her teeth when she smiled a bit too acutely. And when her bangs got swept too far left and she stopped to fix them, I would then realize the slighted axis of her head meant she was thinking too deeply, longingly for something envisaged in the far distance. For the sun had finally drained into night and we found ourselves leaning against a stone balcony rail. Against its stone clad with chill, we, much with puerile dare, hung our torsos taut over its edge to give us clearer sights of the city’s lights. Twinkling spangled stars we admired and to the city raucous we listened. We blew out clouds of cold breath and watched as they made their way up into the midnight sky.
Plumes of white smoke drifted up into the clouds, hiding the moon and the stars until all the sky cloaked in gray. Pilling among the fabric of perched fog, we puffed from a cigarette. Only a small cherry depicted the one color visible next to the shadows of her face, the black of her clothes, and my own ghostly figure. Ash fell in gray sediments as if the sky were shedding loose and moody detritus about the back of our pick up truck. Much likely to smell putridly in the later. Although, where we sat, city lights didn’t stretch and city noises couldn’t fill the silence. Only the inhalation of a cigarette carried our taciturn presence into the world, and most assured, she said she liked it that way. Perhaps I did too no differently. All we had was a blanket draped over our intertwined legs, a lighter resting on the frame of the truck, and a pack of cigarettes in her right pocket. Dust seemed to lick the freshness of our skin, coating us in its filth as if to escape the barren landscape among the mountains and find companionship beside a girl of life, and a ghost of a girl. My mind was spinning with tobacco when she turned her amused face to me, then asked a question and reasoned with me as to call it curiosity. In my bloodstream the drug interwove itself, compelling my mind to reel with the possibilities of an answer. And when she tucked her hair behind her ears, revealing a flush of her cheeks against the cold, her eyes stunned me with their brightness. Like city lights and stars blended together. It wasn’t hard to find a spotlight shed upon the girl I dreamt about, the girl I tried so valiantly to uncover once more. Because here she was, bright and lively in the darkness of every moment. Drunk off the night’s air. Drunk off imagination. There she was, the monster in my sleepless nights, complaining and hungry for life to flood her decrepit veins before they became a tomb for insipidness. When she handed me the cigarette, I took a drag, settling its fetid smoke deep within my lungs and when the gray plumes lifted, perhaps my answer could be found within.
The blur of my mirror disseminated and warranted a clear view of my reflection bereft of any dreamlike enchantments. Before me stood a monster. A girl. A woman. And call it my imagination, but I felt a strange answer bubble up brightly within me, unaware of its conceivement, all I knew were three words capable of more meaning than any others. “I am you”, I said aloud to whomever had wondered.