A Self Portrait on a Thursday

I haven’t had an up-close photo taken like this in a long time—not since I cut my hair on a whim. Now, my face bare, with nothing left to hide behind.

My camera is always in my hands, with me behind it.

I look at myself now, and I see all the days of my life weighing in my eyes. Call it an existential crisis, to me it feels oddly calming: the uneven tones, my eyelids dark like violet dust, my mouth a replica of my mother’s.

Through the chaos and seasons, expressions of surprise and frustration have carved gentle curves into my face. All the tears that have been roughly wiped away, the three tiny freckles in the shape of Orion’s Belt—this familiar yet unfamiliar face of mine remains intact.

I am grateful for this, even though there have been many days and weeks when I avoided my own reflection, even in the silver of a spoon at breakfast. I feared that my resting face looked lost or distant rather than sweet or dreamy.

“You’re always somewhere else,” a boy I was once in love with told me. “Whatever riddle you’re solving in your head, stop,” he’d laugh, shaking his head. Little did he know I would look away, pretending to be lost in thought, just to avoid drowning in his eyes. Later, wading through unrequited heartbreak, I'd search for those eyes in every crowd, terrified I’d forget just what shade of blue they were.

This photograph, this human, is the sum total of everything that has come before—everything I have seen and done, and everything that has been done to me. I am everyone, everything whose existence has affected, or was affected by, mine.

In this moment, the sun is behind the clouds, and the silk curtains rise up like ghostly figures from the sea breeze. Faded rainbows appear by the shutters as rays begin to slowly creep in, their vivid colours warming my palms as I try to hold them.

I take my time, sitting still, staring out—it’s a Thursday.

And I see that damned shade of blue—his eyes—in the sea when the sun hits just right.

But isn’t that the way it goes?

There’s that notion that it all comes back. Joan Didion writes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem about how when we wish to go someplace, do something, afford this, or acquire that, one fragment of us from another time whispers, “Oh, one day you will,” or, “No, that’ll always remain a daydream.” Perhaps it's difficult to appreciate these fragments returning with such moods, but I feel them sometimes.

Didion suggests we remain on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them pleasant company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced, hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. on a bad night, demanding to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

We forget all too quickly the things we thought we'd never forget. We forget what we whispered and what we screamed; we forget who we were.

I myself have lost touch with past versions of myself, too. Yet sometimes they resurface—seventeen-year-old me, nine-year-old me, even the me from just one year ago—talking and reminding me of past times and 'remember whens.' As much as I sometimes want to silence these versions of myself, I sit back, listen, and feel my heart sink and rise, as if I am dissolving and falling. Gracefully yet out of control, like soft sand in an hourglass tipping over and over again until I see my reflection clearly, realizing I am actually one and alone despite all these layers and chapters.

I mean alone, though, not always lonely.

Maybe in ten years' time, I'll sit down with this version of myself again. Whatever we feel, it all matters, and hopefully, at all the right times, it all comes back to us.

And somehow, our same old reflection always says what words cannot.