Washing My Face at a Mirror

Through a Glass Darkly

I tell myself, don't lose sight...its not futility, there is something at the end of all this digging. Day after day, week after week, its ultimately for a reward...once enough money is saved...and relative independence declared. You'll see, I say to him, who stares back from the free side of the mirror...with heavy eyes that carry over night after night and all the accumulation of deprived sleep hangs there. A few months from now, a year from where we began--thats when you'll have that angle from which to determine whether we're progressing or not.

His silence condemns me, I can't rationalize anything against that gray countenance, haggard and honest. My face, through that glass shows me exactly what I'm doing to myself--he leaves nothing out, not even for the sake of politeness, for the sake of self-endurance, the kind of endurance inspired by a somatically, blissful ignorance. My body hates this job, hates these days, quivers with tempest and then with every muscle, bone, and cell--it repels this plea for condition. My mind is at once the lonely director with a cast of disenchanted players, quick-tempered actors assuming roles and guided along without full assurance of exactly what direction they're being driven. If only they could be patient, patient and confident, trusting themselves to me...Don't they know that to slight them is to slight myself, I'm in no hurry to make a fool of either of us--If only they could hold on until the end, then they'll see what I've been organizing.

And again the eyes just sit in the hollow caves of sockets and stare. It could be worse, I tell him...I tell him, there are jobs that ask far more than what your current one barely requests. No movement but he's farther away than before. Behind that glass that seems to have gotten thicker between us since we last spoke. I can't help but answer for him...I can't help but know his reply, his answer to my desperate attempts to neutralize the burns of our circumstance--He realizes the danger in placing to the peripheral, that which should always be attended to. One must always be aware of certain sensibilities or they fade away into ambivalence and there, find a cozy dark corner on which to fester and reproduce fungus. To become comfortable and sedated, retired somewhere in the obscure recesses of unconcern. Securely tucked within an advantageous blind spot...He fears this is where our alarm will be hidden, held hostage.

Consistency, the face finally says back to me. Consistency is how you'll convince me. Theory placed into successful practice, all you"ve to do is show me that something is different--that something we did before, any of the elements that lead us to where we became listless and sterile, have been jettisoned.