My New Reflection

Pushing up off the bed I look around the room, spotting the full-length mirror tilted at an askew angle and buried behind a few boxes. I shuffle them aside and take it out, propping it up and looking at the reflection that appears to me.

I’m not familiar with her face. She’s still a stranger to me even though I’ve been in her body for hours now and even though I’ve got her memories in my head. She’s a stranger and yet she ought not to be, because I know on some level that she is me and that I do know her better than anyone else.

Yet I don’t know her like this.

It’s like there is static in my brain, in her memories. I can pick out most things and recall them as if I lived through them, but when it comes to moments like this it’s like they just simply don’t exist. If I had to guess I’d put money down that she’d done everything in her power to never look in the mirror.

And I could kind of identify with that.

I’d never been comfortable in my own skin. I’d never felt like I was someone who should be seen. Always a little too heavy or a little too short. Always quick to pick out every one of my own flaws and until they eclipsed all other parts of me and they were, in the end, all that anyone could see. Or at least all that I could.

If Emily was a version of me from a different life then I wasn’t surprised that she felt the same way about her own appearance. Even if I couldn’t see it, even if I couldn’t comprehend it, that didn’t make her own baggage any less heavy.

But I wasn’t her and I could see with clearer eyes. I could see the woman in the mirror who stepped back and took a deep breath and opened her eyes to take in all of herself. I could see the way that others might look at her and I could know with absolute certainty that she is beautiful.

Maybe there is something in that revelation which I should take home.

Something about how beauty being in the eye of the beholder or something about you being your own worst critic? Because if I found her as beautiful while she did not, then maybe that meant that I shouldn’t be quite so down on my own appearance. Though if there was a lesson to be learned then I wasn’t of a mindset to understand it right now.

Instead my mind was racing as it was split pretty much dead evenly between focusing on anything but what I was about to do and focusing entirely on what I was about to do. It was inevitable. It was necessary. Even if I wanted to run far away from this life this moment was a moment that would come at some point or another, so why not now?

I needed to undress and that meant needing to see her, to see her body. Every last inch of it.

It has been so long since I’d been in the presence of a naked woman, longer than I’d like to admit. And the instances hadn’t exactly been frequent enough so to brag about so the fact that the basest and most carnal part of me was looking forward to this was something I wasn’t exactly proud of, but also something that I wasn’t prepared to deny.

My hands played over the fabric of my heavy sweater, remembering all the moments today that had come close to this. The feeling of my soft warm body under my hands in the bus station bathroom as I started to explore only to be so cruelly interrupted. The harried changing in the library bathroom, jamming a t-shirt on top of the one I was already wearing and then later the feeling of both shirts clinging to my curves after being soaked to the bone.

And though they were but dreams all of those memories of future possibilities. All of the hands on me and the pressing need within me. The rush of those sensations that all brought me back to the words of that only other person who had gone through what I’d gone through before.

“But I don’t know what else to call it. Things feel different now. They feel electrifying. Everything feels so much more intense, like all my senses are dialed up to eleven. Everything. Everything is so different now.

“Including me.”

Did that mean what I thought it meant? Did it mean that I could feel so much more?

Did it mean that once I got a taste I’d never want to go back?

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