I accidentally caught a glimpse in the mirror,
Of the man who is supposed to be me,
And I wept in a moment,
The sorrow of a lifetime contained in thirty seconds,
When My eyes gazed upon the face they belonged to.
It wasn’t the lack of perfection,
Or the fat clinging to my childhood’s cheekbones,
That startled me,
But rather the dull reflection of the orbs I relied on,
To give visual representation to my dirge,
(Stuck on repeat in the echo chamber of my mind,
Which serves as the soundtrack to my experience),
Peering back at me with the judgement I’ve so long shirked,
Like a terrified child separated from his/her/its adult in a sterile grocery store,
Alone in a plane polluted with proliferated possibility;
A blind seeker without a guide,
Yearning for a post to give meaning to the chaos of a well-lighted place.
The boy-turned-man staring back at me in the glassy abstraction who I could only call me,
So alien to the idyllic ‘me’ I had constructed internally,
Broke me down in a way I wasn’t expecting,
Though I thought I was prepared for,
Making me feel smaller than the giant I needed to be,
To shield my love from the dangerous ideas I know lurked in the peripheral sea,
(which isn’t to say distant)
That constantly encroaches on my tiny plot of confidence,
(which isn’t to say certainty),
Constantly erased by the tides of time,
Saturated by the anxiety accompanied by logic and the poison of doubt,
(the curse God deemed deserving of our lot).
As the waves crash against my lie-mstone castle,
(with the ripples pulsing inward-outward),
My strength wavers each time I brace for the future,
Buckling my imitation as a steward,
Until the dawn breaks through the mist,
Stretching her yawning cry across my salt-soaked armor,
Like a whisper on the wind:
“If only you can light the night,
When I am collapsed under celestial weight,
Ships will sail towards you with a fervor,
Only matched by the struggle of your flame”