I look in the mirror and wonder what happened to the man I once was. My eyes are still squinted from the night’s rest, and I have a plume-like patch of hair sticking straight up in the air, reaching up to heaven in the open space like the thoughts that are escaping my mind. The mirror is a place where I look at myself and reflect, both literally and existentially.
I have aged in these past few years. My face is fuller from the cafeteria food I gorged myself with in college. My clothes and overall style has evolved from the teenage individualist cliché to a more mature clean cut appearance. The corrective lenses are new from the “me” that I knew in high school. A lot has changed since high school. A lot has changed since college. A lot has changed in my life.
I used to live in a world of black and white. There was a line I knew not to EVER cross… or so I thought. And though I haven’t become a person I think my past self would despise, I have become someone who has seen that the world is full of grey. And not the grey that dulls the industrial sky, the melancholic dark that rolls in with a storm, but a beautiful grey – a grey that encapsulates an old family photo or a classic film.
And here I am and I see the grey in myself. Not the grey hairs of a man who has seen a world of experience, but the marks and sternness of a face that has questioned more than answered, tried and failed, and through it has changed on the inside.
Sometimes I feel like I barely recognize myself – and I don’t know if I should be scared.
I went from going to school everyday to not knowing what I am supposed to do. I would sit in class, take notes, and tests would have right or wrong answers. I was taught to think abstractly but not to act similarly. So here I am staring at myself in the mirror hoping that today I will know the choice I have to make and not fail my future. It’s as though time has paused waiting for a decision to be made.
Sometimes I forget to think in the now. I am so stuck on what is behind or ahead that I forget that what I am living in is the present – now. I will get so caught up with all of it that it is hard for me to be caught in a moment. I psych myself out. And because of this I often miss the changes, good and bad, that I am making in people’s lives.
So here I am looking at what’s happening in my life now.
Am I happy with what I see?
BOBERT HILL 