Matt Duckworth Underwater: April 2014

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Face in the Mirror

I once went on a camping trip to Fish Lake and didn't shave for a week, which meant I didn't look at my face in a mirror for a week. We were in the woods, so no shop windows to check my hair, no car windows to glance at my reflection. Sure, I could have looked at my face in the surface of the lake, just as Eve did after God had created her--and she saw an absolutely beautiful creature, so beautiful that Adam was a real let-down when she first saw him--but I didn't think to look at my face in the water while fishing. I don't think I would have had an Eve-like experience anyway.

Instead, I was surprised when I got home at the end of the week, staggered into the bathroom, exhausted from a long day hiking, swimming, and fishing and from an 8 or 9 hour drive, and stood in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, reaching for my toothbrush and toothpaste. (And yes, I'd been brushing all week long; don't get distracted from my story.) So, a week away from a mirror and when I looked I saw a stranger. I saw myself as I guess I really am. I saw the wideness of my jawbones, the narrowness of my chin, the skinny roundness of my nose, the shaggy eyebrows, the bright blue eyes. I saw all that and the rest from a different perspective, a perspective not governed by my own ideas of myself, not governed by the way I'd always thought of my face (unremarkable, but mine).

I looked in that mirror, and I saw myself, but only for a moment, a flash of sight, and then there was just me, just Matt, looking back at me, a slightly quizzical look on my face as if that reflected self were amused by all that had passed so swiftly through my brain. 'Thinking too much again,' Mirror-Matt said, 'It's just you and me here.'

I looked frankly at myself in that mirror, and I laughed.

--entry found in an old notebook back in 2014

(lightly edited)