reflection // dual dupability

It’s fascinating
to watch someone lie to themselves
and, by extension, to you.

You want to be mad
To shake them, to wake them
To hold a mirror and say
“See. Here.”

But Alice is not an English teacher
or a psychologist.
To her, her dreams are just dreams.

So even if she does climb through the looking glass,
there’s no telling what she’ll take from the encounter
and bring to the waking

But I’ll tell you one thing:
It’s unlikely to be the truth you were hoping for.

Our brains work so hard
to protect us from our own reflection
But eventually we’ll catch an honest glimpse,
in a storefront window or a glassy puddle
or the eye of someone we love
And we’ll realize, with a jolt,
all the truths we’ve been running from.

And we’ll start to wonder who else knew
but was gracious enough to let us see it for ourselves
And we’ll start to wonder who else knew not
and was as gullible as I.

(08.24.22)

reunion

I got back from my high school reunion a few hours ago and I can’t sleep. I have four hours of conversation and interactions replaying in my head and as much as I want them to stop, there’s part of me that allows them to keep going. The masochistic part of me? The part that believes that this is a healthy way to process the evening? I’m not sure.

Tonight was a reminder of how much has happened in the last ten years, of how different I am, of how much I’ve grown.

Tonight was a reminder that there’s continuity in who we are, some things never change, and ten years is but a blink of an eye.

A reunion in the age of social media is a weird thing. We put so much of our lives on the internet, but don’t ever fully know who’s paying attention. And of course, even if they are, that doesn’t mean they know the whole story. Or even the half of it.

Did a couple dozen conversations over the course of a few hours go any deeper? I mean, no, not really. Yet something about it was so much more connective. We bounced around and gave the elevator pitches of our lives, but we looked each other in the eye as we did it. The character limits were fluid, the status updates punctuated by the popping of balloons.

This wasn’t the same as the small talk I’ve been swimming in the last few months. Which is its own kind of beautiful. This wasn’t a bunch of strangers trying to figure each other out, antenna reaching out, exploring. This was slipping into an old and dearly loved pair of jeans. It was a rubber band snapping back. It was that specific scent that always reminds you of home. It was a mushroom appearing overnight even though the mycelia had been in the soil for ages. It was the fingers that fit so well in yours, even after all this time. It was a fleeting glimpse in the rearview mirror, wondering who will still be there after the next hairpin turn.

I hope you are.

To everyone I got to reconnect with, thank you.