Mirrors

to be published as lost and found column #14 (?) on January 29, 2005 in Sun.Star Weekend Cebu.

As a kid who liked being alone, I used to hang out in front of the mirror a lot. When I was about 10 or 11, my mother hung a full-length mirror in front of the stairs, and that was where I would sit on slow afternoons, staring at my reflection for what seemed like hours.

It wasn’t that I liked looking at myself. Rather, it was a time of figuring-out, of trying to reconcile the face I saw with the person I knew inside. Most of the time I’d leave with a sense of disquiet, unable to find anything familiar or friendly in my outward self. Which might explain why people generally find me icy and unapproachable at first meeting--even I seem aloof to myself.

The past year I’ve turned to taking photos of my reflection in the mirror, still trying to get a glimpse of the person I see inside me, on the outside. Call it vanity, but I now have a whole collection of these to remember my old selves by. They’re sort of like journals (which I’ve been keeping since I was 9), except that my journal entries are reflections made by my inner self at various points in the drama of my life, while these self-portraits (taken with much trial and error in angle and film exposure) are literally reflections of my outer self, the self the world sees and talks to. Each shot is like a record of my existence, proof that yes, I am human not vampire, and that sometime in my life, this is what I looked like.

Not looking in the mirror has actually had some pretty bad consequences for me. For a year, I lived in a place that didn’t have a proper mirror. It was broken and gave a distorted reflection of either just my feet, or my whole body from far away. At some point I forgot what my face looked like. When I saw a mirror at the mall I couldn’t believe it was my reflection staring back at me.

Worse (and this really happened), I grew pimply and fat; my clothes were bursting at the seams without my realizing it. It is dangerous to live life just relying on the mirror in your pressed powder compact. So vanity or not, it’s good, no, necessary, to regularly reflect on what’s happening to yourself--both inside and out. Documenting the process on film and paper is simply having something to hold on to, a remembrance to look through when you’re older and grayer.

Strangely enough, at least two people in my family have given me mirrors as gifts. Just last Christmas my father gave me a large one for my room at home. Sometimes people can be mirrors themselves, by their actions showing you parts of yourself--both annoying and cute--you’d otherwise never see. Great books can be that, too, or films, or paintings.

The best and worst thing about the future is that you never know what’s in it. I wonder if I’ll ever get to take my master’s degree abroad. I wonder if I’ll ever get to own a house by the beach. I wonder who I’ll end up with for the rest of my life, and if our kids will be cute. But for now I thank God that I have my mirrors to tell me straight who and where I am at each present moment. That’s all I need to know which way I should--or shouldn’t--be going.