On Pulling White Hairs
In the mirror, my eyes wear from searching silver out from the darkness. When I catch myself in the pupil, I see through and past, blurry until focus locks. If I stare long enough, one thing becomes another. I am a girl, a child, a photograph’s white eye. It’s not a trick of the mind, just exhaustion like any other folding of one memory into another. I have to grab hold of something steady to know myself and then pull back and out again—I am a woman, breath fogging the mirror glass, golden tweezers slipping silver hairs from the thick wax of her skull.
The body operates on its own timeline, some seasons draw long, and others shorten like a drought year’s wood-ring. The more I focus, the more I find between the roots. There’s nothing essential in the ritual, it’s just a simple outward-facing reward. But recently something other than beauty and its sharp hook have snagged me as I search out the white. When my eyes shift into focus and hold themselves stiff in the mirror, I catch her, just past the ghost of myself as a girl.
It’s been years since I’ve seen Abby with my own two eyes (as they say) but I’ve held her image in my palm and watched her grow, marry, mother, on the reflective screen of my phone. Her eyes cracked slowing into fine lines, crow’s feet gathering up her freckles, her dark hair spun through with silver after the baby. She sets down the camera phone and takes selfies with her young daughter. In these snapshots, her eyes—looking at themselves in the screen—boomerang, matching my eyes in the mirror. Out and in and tumbling toward some kind of togetherness.
Abby, I think, as I shiver to grab a tail of silver, eyes up and then, falling, focusing. I knew myself by her until I lost that map; and although we share a birth year, our bodies keep different times. As a girl, I could have counted the freckles on her face like we numbered stars in the night sky. She grew tall the summer before seventh grade so that when we went trick-or-treating dressed as a couple from the 1940s, she was a towering pinup in a thrift-store fur coat, and I was her small beloved, swimming in her stepfather’s naval dress uniform, my lip smudged with a mascara mustache. Abby, my tall Juliet. When a neighbor boy let us into an R-rated screening of Shakespeare in Love, we found we had the theater to ourselves and performed in the aisles—bowing, curtsying, reciting sonnets with the huge lips parting onscreen. It was a kind of love that was also mirroring.
One night in elementary school we stayed up until the witching hour and held hands in the dark. We were going to look into the face of the vanity mirror on her dresser, we were going to confront something but neither of us had the courage. We counted one, two, three, and then stared at each other instead, frightened of what we’d heard of eternity, how it cursed you. There were words we were supposed to recite but we knew that just the eyes mattered so closing them we walked blindly back to our sleeping bags, tripping on pillows, until, lying down we blinked them open at the chemical light of the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling still shining, late in the night.
Without a word, I feel her near to me. I bring her up like some kind of witchcraft, a strand of silver hair and a mirror. I could speak to her through the glass but it’s a trick of fog and reflection, just as deceptive as a camera and a filter. But I want to know how a body ages, how it grows, and the harder I look the more I see my bones rising to the surface. Maybe what we laid down then matters most of all. This rippling distorts even the simplest reflection.