I look at you and I see a mirror that does not reflect myself back at me. You’ve become an illusory expansion of a tight confine. The borders are diffracted infinitely, my surroundings have surrounded me boundlessly, my walls are all the more apparent, but through all of it, I see your true green. My invisible looking glass doppelgänger sparkles the color of motherboard chips, the greed of Emerald City, the shine of August peridots in a well-guarded Tiffany’s.
You warned of a Trojan horse and were rewarded with sea serpents. I remembered the squeeze, that slithering contraction, twisted blue around your limbs. And I remembered listening as well as I remember biting apart the bitter flesh of pomegranates to reach the jewels inside, and I remembered my first winter, and I remembered alabaster fountains and entanglement in pig intestines and letting that horse in. We’re past apologies, I think. It doesn’t matter whether or not the caged bird sings at night, now. The venom has already frothed your lips. It’s all damage control from here.
Our new reality is paint strategically dribbled over a canvas on the floor—Prussian blue, Tuscan sun, and so much jade—a record of movement. Even this, I don’t see myself in. The brush never touches the canvas. High modernity. I wouldn’t know which era to place myself in. I hardly want to be in the current one. I hope now is a good time to confess that I hate the spring, I curse the invasive vines taking over my mailbox, I wait anxiously for autumn to yellow the leaves so I can crunch them under my heels, and I especially hate the way you color in my unknown depictions with your shaky lineart and uncouth strokes. You can’t reflect me, thank God. I’d rather be wed to two fangs in a tattered white nightgown.
You’ve mentioned that you’ve seen me in crystal balls, drawn my tell-tale tarot cards, and that sounds fun. But I don’t want to see myself in you. Preferably, not in anyone, and particularly not in a mirror while I summon bile to my teeth over porcelain. In you, I’m agoraphobic and exposed to all my Ouija board predators with “Goodbye” scratched out. I’m knocking at the two-way glass walls and bloodying bruised knuckles.
There are spots in my vision from all the bouncing light, floating scribbles that I can never quite catch. The only excitation nowadays is of photons. Force feed one color in, vomit out another—sometimes it’s jellyfish, but most of the time it’s seashore plankton fluorescence and it’s on the hate list I check twice and thrice and twice again because there’s always more to add to it. I want to be cramped in a tiny box and forgotten in an attic, that’s all. The more growing pains the better, because then at least I know I’m evolving, then at least I can finally be a big fish in a little pond and complain about my mundane hometown and talk about writing a great American novel I haven’t even started.
So don’t look at me. I want to feel big, again, please.