You look in the mirror and it has grown on you: it’s getting older. The skin is different, darker, but not by shade. Darker because it is thicker, less bone can be seen.
It moves differently, it appeals to you and even though it is a complete stranger to you, it is a part of your life; it represents you and everyone recognizes it as you. Is this me?, you ask, in front of the mirror, regarding the skin, this you, this body that doesn’t feel like you, but that you like the feel of. You are different, you are immobile and every minute is spent on staring at a specific spot, intensely and in awe.
It is as if you are a surgeon in a morgue with a corpse-and despite the fact that you are not a pathologist-you are familiar with bodies, but this is a corpse, a once-was-a-body. You are in a morgue with a once-was-of-something-you-knew-of.
And, you, as a surgeon, while examining the corpse as if it was a living thing, find the things that do not make it body anymore, that which define it as a corpse. You want to know more of this once-was-what-you-knew-of but you are incapable, because you are who you are, in the wrong room with what you, only once, knew of.
To learn more than that, you have to be other than you, to become past that, a once-were also, and still be who you are. A doctor, a surgeon, a pathologist, but you leave the room with much effort.
This is how your eyes trace this skin, this set of flesh before you in the mirror, reflecting an other you, when you were equipt only to see yourself.
And with each entering and re-entering of this room, you are a little-less-of a surgeon, a little-more-of a pathologist. You leave to learn how to interpret this body by how others react to it. You learn of how it no longer breathes the same way, if at all. You learn that some of its reflexes are gone and it has acquired other characteristics you never knew of.
This newfound knowledge is neither pleasing nor comforting; nor is it disturbing or cause for panic.
You hardly believe what you see before you, is you, when the you, that you saw before, is no longer there to know as you. At one time, you were someone recognizable as, and to, yourself. You are still you, but you do not know yourself anymore. You are there replacing what you were because the texture has changed, it is suddenly other than the minute changes you have grown accustomed to, as you, before the you you see in the mirror. You are you that no longer is you. This is you, in the mirror. The skin is getting older.