Alyson ZW


PHOENIX


Leaving tomorrow.

Thinking about the mirrors in this house. I used to regard them as entities with their own motivations for showing me what they did. They were the mercurial ones, a new mood every hour. They were the ones that changed me, in their reflections.

I regard them now with less personality. They seem tired and old, like my grandparents whose house they live in. Are in. In them, I not only see myself, but the person who used them to cut reality. I see now there was never any conversation between myself and these mirrors and I’m made even lonelier. How narcissistic and beautiful it is to think an object would attempt to destroy me.

I never wondered why I wanted to be skinny but wondered all the time why Phoenix made me want it more. My moral justification for getting skinny was that I’d be making room for another person in heaven. The heaven inside this mirror. Hell, if you tilt your head that way. I was disappointed to learn Simone Weil didn’t struggle with superficiality. For me, God only came after starvation. Not the other way around.

Mirrors look like nothing; they are exactly what you are not. By definition, they are everything in reverse. You only ever see yourself as you exist in this second world. Mirrors are always talking about something going on elsewhere.

I still don’t know what mirrors are made of. I could look it up but I wouldn’t believe the answer. The answer would not answer what I really mean to ask, which is how do mirrors see everything yet nothing real. And: who decided to make them?

Grandpa and I watched Jeopardy tonight. Three champions took on the category of “Alloys”. I didn’t know a single answer, though I surprised myself with some right ones in the history category that I remembered from AP classes. I still assume the world and its histories are too big for me to know anything about it, despite all I do know about it, and am continually surprised when the host repeats what I’m thinking, never saying. But I do remember that an alloy is two substances fused together, one being a metal, to create a third thing. And the afternoons I spent in 5th period slowly coming to terms with science, returning to my body via memory.

Perhaps I have fused with these mirrors. Perhaps we are an alloy, the third and new thing being the crooked body we built together. The body that existed nowhere but between us. Our little secret. One I tried to tell again and again, those same mirrors prohibiting anyone from ever hearing me (seeing me), telling them a different truth, their word against mine. As though someone discovering our fusion, our collaboration on a true falsehood, would undo all our work. The secret that cannot be told. (There are so many meanings embedded in “cannot be told”: cannot be told for safety’s sake, for morality, or literally, in the sense that there is no way to express it. This situation includes all of them). How to explain what does not exist. Only mirrors know how.

Thinking of when I attempted an essay in an undergrad nonfiction workshop about my childhood visits to this house, my grandparents’ house in Phoenix. It tried to answer my anorexia. I was making it answer for my anorexia. It wanted to answer it even less than I wanted to live it, which was even less than I wanted to be 100lbs. I described several theories. All were answers of no real issue. In the last draft I brought to class, the last class of the term, I had written something about Phoenix and anorexia both sharing the letter “x”. Something about the chances of these two symbiotic forces, the place that fed the pathology and vice versa, both including the rarest letter in the alphabet. The professor, whose name I forget and whose hard demeanor I remember, really liked that. After a term of shitty, meaningless, opaque drafts, I had written something decent, even if just a few sentences. She was still praising me as class got out. She told me this “wasn’t the end”, that we’d continue our conversation. She said it again as she walked away from me on the street in downtown New York. I’d been emailing her that term eager to know what she knew about seeing and saying things clearly. I emailed her one more time a week later. I never heard back. The end.