The Weird Kid
Sunday, October 26, 2008
The mirror
My friend's wedding pictures have gone online now.
They were taken by a talented man in black who moved with ignorable urgency throughout the day.
The photos are good. The remind me of the kind of magazine ads I used to tape to my dorm room wall in boarding school. In the foreground is the elegant bridal shoe, awaiting it's performance, and just there, far behind, the silhouette of the bride against a pain of glass.
I'm in some. The man, I think, was an artist, and he tried. He took hundreds of photos he rejected. There is one of me giving my toast, before I left the hall in tears and did not return. I spoke for under five minutes and he spun around me, snap snap snap snap.
I'm shown in a place more beautiful than I remember being in. I'm alone, very alone on the dancefloor, no sign of the DJ behind me or full tables in front. I'm backlit in a moody gloom, my shadow twice my height stretching out of frame. It's beautiful. But I'm not. I'm just not.
It's not the fat. Or is it? I look wrong. I look, distorted and swollen, as if by illness, ancient dropsy. Like a rotten biblical wineskin, swollen toward bursting with misplaced fresh wine. I'm full of good, I swear to you, but the skin that contains me is rotten.
And here is my question. When you look in the mirror, do you say, "Yep, that's me"? Or is a small part of you always puzzled, thinking, "no, no that's not quite right."
I have never matched my mirror. Not as a child, not when I was thinner, and now, as the wedding photos captured, I'm poured into a sick stranger.
Am I the only one?
They were taken by a talented man in black who moved with ignorable urgency throughout the day.
The photos are good. The remind me of the kind of magazine ads I used to tape to my dorm room wall in boarding school. In the foreground is the elegant bridal shoe, awaiting it's performance, and just there, far behind, the silhouette of the bride against a pain of glass.
I'm in some. The man, I think, was an artist, and he tried. He took hundreds of photos he rejected. There is one of me giving my toast, before I left the hall in tears and did not return. I spoke for under five minutes and he spun around me, snap snap snap snap.
I'm shown in a place more beautiful than I remember being in. I'm alone, very alone on the dancefloor, no sign of the DJ behind me or full tables in front. I'm backlit in a moody gloom, my shadow twice my height stretching out of frame. It's beautiful. But I'm not. I'm just not.
It's not the fat. Or is it? I look wrong. I look, distorted and swollen, as if by illness, ancient dropsy. Like a rotten biblical wineskin, swollen toward bursting with misplaced fresh wine. I'm full of good, I swear to you, but the skin that contains me is rotten.
And here is my question. When you look in the mirror, do you say, "Yep, that's me"? Or is a small part of you always puzzled, thinking, "no, no that's not quite right."
I have never matched my mirror. Not as a child, not when I was thinner, and now, as the wedding photos captured, I'm poured into a sick stranger.
Am I the only one?
posted by Imez at 8:49 PM
3 Comments:
i was always shocked looking in the mirror when i was younger. the mirror showed a beutiful me that was not right. Now it shows an old bat, and that's not right either.
i never feel as if the mirror is right. sometimes i have to remind myself that it really is me.
I've always been that fat girl.
Size 2 and still fat.
I've always had a clown nose.
still do
This morning I spent 5 minutes I didn't have pulling back the skin on my face, wishing I had the money to have a lift.
What I see in the mirror makes me want to beg others to tell me something different.
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