it’s 10 o’clock

I used to cup my hands around my eyes and push my face onto the mirror in the downstairs bathroom. It was the 1980’s and having a mirror from floor to ceiling was a high priority. I would look left, right, and quickly back into the center. I was trying to see if I could move faster than my reflection, to really truly see a another person’s perspective of what I look like. I felt like no matter how long you look at yourself in the mirror, you only really see a piece. I look at my mouth. I look at my eyelashes. I look at my chin and compare it to my dad’s. But I can never see my whole face, the way I can see my mom’s or the kids in my class at school. Because -this- person is the aggregate of their parts, where I am only an arm, an eyeball, and a tongue. This experiment was also created by fear. After recently watching one of the Poltergeist movies, I had to confirm that my sum of parts in the mirror wasn’t watching me while I was not watching it. So I would try to catch secret glimpses and confirm that I was not in danger.