Two Essays: “I didn’t expect him on my birthday” and “True Mirror”
I didn’t expect him on my birthday
because I had other things on my mind, like celebrating my twenty-fourth at a spa where a woman massaged me in tandem with my whispers of harder, then softer, for ninety minutes—no more no less—because my muscles would continue to tighten if someone didn’t put pressure on them to relax, and I thought my body could have a day off, too, because
I didn’t expect him on my birthday, especially not after the massage, when Amelia and I met in the crowded, frigid park for a hot dog and babka, which I ate while the marble lions—Patience and Fortitude—bookending the library façade stared at me, until we decided it was time to cross the busy intersection to the venue where we had tickets for Angel Olsen, who was touring for her album My Woman, and where we sat in red plush mezzanine chairs, from where we could see Angel in her astronaut-like jumpsuit and silver streamer wig, a vision, a distraction, so that
I didn’t expect him on my birthday, even when I expect someone most other days, on packed subways and empty platforms and quiet streets at night, but then again, I fell asleep during the concert—tired beyond control, beyond alertness—when I wanted to be awake, and maybe if I had been awake, he wouldn’t have come, or at least not on my birthday,
though whether I expected him on my birthday wouldn’t have mattered to him anyway, and it was past midnight by the time I stepped out of my subway station—which was twelve to fifteen minutes from my doorstep, depending on how fast I could walk, which depended on what shoes I was wearing or how much baggage I had—and after I crossed a wide avenue, desolate in the night but harshly lit by neon signs glowing ghostly, still
I didn’t expect him on my birthday, despite the usual care and caution I took when avoiding the shadowed sidewalks of my neighborhood, and when I exited the dark patch on my street and into the moonlit intersection, I noticed a man walking behind me, hyperaware of my bare legs, and so I crossed to the other side of the street and continued on, not daring to look back to check if he, too, switched sides, fearing my eye contact would signal an invitation
on my birthday, and when I finally made it to my apartment building, with its heavy metal door and a glass window cracked with what looked like bullet holes, I withdrew my keys from my purse, my body turned away from the direction I came, and as I fumbled over jagged metal, I saw a blur of a body behind me, felt him push me against my door, my hands on the cool glass window, his hands lifting my skirt until I fell on my knees and cried out, wanting the volume of my screams to prove
True Mirror
I discover the True Mirror where most people discover things—on the internet. The universe sends me a TikTok, showing two mirrors joined at a ninety-degree angle, forming a seamless, three-dimensional, non-reversed reflection. Its seamlessness allows the viewer to make eye contact with their real self, where a regular mirror not only reverses your image but contains a gap in eye contact, preventing you from experiencing your asymmetrical face. A Google search leads me to a magazine article from 2004. The writer seeks out this mirror and for the first time looks at herself, surprised, laughing, smiling, the way anyone else would, but she is left haunted by what she sees. Others are moved, brought to tears by the act of witnessing themselves. At the time of my discovery, I am simultaneously curious and fearful of the mirror’s ability to show a true me. The me the world sees. As if what is seen is what makes something, or someone, true.
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On a Zoom call with faculty and students of my creative writing program, participants span at least two full gallery screens. Only a handful of people have their cameras on. I know it’s not a requirement but an etiquette, depending on one’s rank in the room. We’ve come to understand that there is an element of personal privacy that we get with the video off, whether it’s because we don’t want to reveal our domestic spaces or faces bare for others’ projections. As a woman, I’m told how I appear is important, especially in a professional setting. But when my camera is off, there’s no opportunity to linger on my appearance.
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During a season of The Bachelor, the man at the center of it all tests positive for Covid-19, so the rose ceremony (the elimination) and the cocktail party (the last chance for female contestants to socialize with the man and save themselves from elimination) are held virtually in hotel rooms somewhere in London. One by one, the women enter a room and converse with the man through a tablet. The woman’s face isn’t present in a little square in the corner of her own screen, perhaps to enhance the feeling of face-to-face connection. During one white woman’s turn, she says it’s good she can’t see herself, because she’d spend the entire time looking at her reflection. The bachelor is immediately taken aback—her admission a red flag for narcissism or a certain disregard for their relationship.
Watching this scene unfold in my living room, a friend and I look at each other. We understand. We are, ourselves, turned off by his reaction. The woman’s statement was not a declaration of vanity. On the other hand, it was not about insecurity. Because we cannot see our faces in the pupils of others like peering into a True Mirror, these real-time reflections allow us to preempt the gaze, that thing of which women in particular are infinitely conscious.
During the rose ceremony, the supposedly vain woman receives the last rose, shaken but relieved. We witness what I silently predicted, two Black women getting eliminated. We watch them say virtual goodbyes to the bachelor through a screen, leaving without the usual parting hug. During a confessional, one of them affirms that she’s good enough. That it just takes the right person to see her worth. And I can’t help but think: or, the right nation.
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It's become trendy to joke about not wanting to be perceived, the feeling heightened when layers of digital funhouse mirrors reflect our faces back at ourselves and others simultaneously. In searching for a meme that would resonate on a day of rather intense self-awareness, I find one on @floggeremoji’s Instagram. A person lies on their stomach, knees bent behind them so their feet overlap in the air in a cutesy way, their smile flashing braces. White text on top reads: stalking my own profile not in a self obsessed way but simply to check how i would perceive me if i wasn’t myself. and also in a very self obsessed way. That I will only ever know my distorted and flattened reflections, which can seem as out of my control as the shape of my own body, causes me alarm.
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My friend gifts me a True Mirror for my birthday, or rather, an unofficial (and more affordable) version, hoping to satiate my curiosity. The original is sold on the True Mirror’s website, under a banner that reads: Happy New Year! Open a new door to yourself this year with your own True Mirror! And another one that reads: Enabling accurate and authentic communication with one's Self. There are tabletop ($250) and full-length ($3,000) options, ones in barn wood ($450) or wrapped in pastel geometric shapes (the “Artist Edition” for $650). Similar products sell on Amazon for as little as $13 in the Beauty & Personal Care section, with names like “Vanity Mirror” or “Makeup Mirror” or “Cosmetic Mirror.”
I receive a tabletop version that I can hold in my hands. It is lightweight, white, plastic—characteristics that don’t carry the heft of “authentic communication with one’s Self,” the weight of my reflection—and yet I fear what I’ll find when I raise it to my face.
And when I finally do, it takes a second to orient it in my hands, to level it with my eyes, to level my own understanding of the tilt of my head and the angle of my gaze. My head looks lopsided, and my face looks ugly. My eyes look tired, swollen. I don’t say I look tired and swollen and ugly, because I still don’t think I can look at myself, into myself. The eye contact I so badly wanted is not happening. Is it a flaw in the mirror? Is the ninety degrees, maybe, actually, eighty-nine degrees? Or am I refusing to accept what I see?
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All the faces visible on the video call are white, and despite my being off camera, I feel a tense, blinding self-awareness in my body, my posture straightening and slouching in quick succession. This is not a new feeling, and it’s not a feeling that comes and goes, but rather changes in degree and intensity. The faceless are represented by black boxes, their names and pronouns centered in white text.
I think of Morgan Parker’s poem “I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background,” after Glenn Ligon after Zora Neale Hurston:
Or, I feel sharp white.
Or, colored against
Or, I am thrown. I am against. Or, when white. I sharp. I color.
Quiet, forget. My country is a boat.
I feel most colored when I swear to god.
I feel most colored when it is too late.
I think of being the only person of color in editorial meetings at the publisher I used to work for, where those who held the purse strings mused about the “trendiness” of Korean American literature, where I was asked to attend a meeting with an Asian American author not as a junior editor growth opportunity but to create the illusion of in-house diversity. Parker, again:
I background my country.
My country sharp in my throat.
I pay taxes and I am a child and I grow into a bright
fleshy fruit.
White bites: I stain the uniform.
I scroll back and forth between the Zoom pages and make note of who in the virtual room is a person of color. There aren’t many, based on the people I know and the names I recognize. But I’m one of them. And suddenly I feel that must be known. And to be known is to be seen. So I turn my camera on. Bare faced, but present.
