The First Thing You Saw

What was it?
You saw yourself in the mirror and said something.
What was it?

I asked my husband this question this morning. Let me say, I wake up about a half hour before he leaves at four thirty a.m. to manage one of several convenience stores (typical foreigner that he is) and although another person might not comprehend this, it is an important thing to understand who he is. I've known him for more than half of my whole life. At this point in our marriage, it will now always be more than half of it. He is who he is and he suffers no illusions about that.

Charismatic and accepting of his own charismatic nature. People adore him even when he's mean and he often is but it is countered with the same devil may care caringness. He knows best and is always right about everything because he takes things simply as they are. He asked me several times when I explain to him what it is I attempt to do in poems, how could a person like you be with a person like me? Good question I think and every married couple should ask this of each other. How could you! There's a line in a movie that I never really finished and can't even remember the name of...Billy Crystal (I think) is speaking to Danny Davito and admits that men are so awful that even they wake up one day and look in the mirror and it's a wonder they don't vomit. But it isn't really about men in general, it's men in specific. People in specific.

I put my head on his back. He was making the coffee. Whereas I would drink whatever was left behind he has to have his fresh and will throw out enormous amounts of coffee whenever he wants a cup. Afrugal. Not just not frugal but afrugal. Not concerned with anything but his own cup.

As I leaned in he said that I didn't sleep well and that it applied to my beauty rest. I need some even though he knows I wake up every day too early in order to work on poetry. I won't have time when I come home and when I'm at work I am not the type to steal hours and work on poetry there even though I probably could.

I indicated that I am not concerned and the lost cause of my youth...is a lost cause. He said he wondered why people don't think they are good looking.

Why indeed. I asked him if he could remember the first time he ever looked in a mirror and contemplated himself, really contemplated or rather, really remembers having contemplated his good looks. Truth of the matter, he isn't all that good looking but he appears to be quite so. His teeth are deranged, his forehead too high, chin too round, in fact it is inherently doubled and has been so forever regardless of his weight. He couldn't ever be declared classically handsome but all the same, he appears to be good looking.

He said that it was in one of the shops and he remembers his uncle Abdullah and he looked into the mirror in one of the dressing rooms there (Liberia) and thought, I'm good looking.

I was surprised. High school? You were that old before you ever considered what Allah had given you i.e. your face?

I told him why this is an important thought and to all people it is so. Even if most people never get around to contemplating it, they will be contemplating it for the rest of their lives subconsiously.

My first memory was looking into the big round mirror in our bedroom (my sister Radiann and I shared a room at that time and the dresser was full of the glasses she had to wear since she was very young and I used to try them on and was jealous of her possession of so many wonderful ways of seeing the world). I was on my knees, about seven years old, nearly hiding from seeing my own self and I picked up a brush, smoothed my hair and said, you aren't that bad. My husband, when I recounted this, didn't get it right away. Because he is that way. Simple. Admits it. Not afraid of it nor ashamed of it and often we laugh at things other people take way too seriously. I laugh with him but am one of those who takes things way too seriously most of the time. Have to fight it really. But I understand his laughter completely. He isn't a poet and confesses that life for him is really easy. For me though, I still hide from my own self in mirrors..don't like them much at all unless I am completely alone and have only to do the necessities of hygeine and baseline acceptable presentation. I analyse everything that I see and sometimes, that is way too deeply. But that is where poems are.

This is a poem.

You don't get it I told him. I said, you are not that bad! In other words, the others in the world hadn't been so generous with me and I told them that I was not that bad. Not that ugly or unpleasant to look at. I also told him that adolescence seems a bit late to be considering one's looks. Had it not occurred to him to look sooner into his own reflection? I told him, even dolphins do better than that and we both laughed and held each other for a few minutes.

I explained to my husband that we all have first impressions of others but what about our first impression of ourself? How important is that! It is really hard to divorce ourselves from our first impressions, nearly impossible for some people it seems. Not everyone and I think that those of us who are able to combat negative first impressions by looking deeper....simply must be on the right track. For a person like him over confident to the point of carelessness even, he wouldn't understand nor would he have to understand in order to survive this life with an intact psychological framework. He simply doesn't bother and hence, he is seemingly good looking.

He has begun to change a bit though. Trying to retain his youth via beauty products for men. The Grecian Formulas and Minoxidil routines. I dab a bit of smooth hundred dollar a bottle serum on my face (my daughter bought it for me, I would never indulge in such excess on my own). When my serum is gone it won't be replaced and it has nothing to do with my comfort level about getting old. Nothing. I just know that it doesn't matter so much nor is it a redeemable quantity of something. Even if others keep trying to redeem it for me, that is just a hope that the past might come back by and remind us of something that we must have forgotten.

In Saudi Arabia once, I spoke to a woman who believed that the djinn live in the mirrors and when a person looks too often in there, the djinn will enchant the careless individual and they will become forgetful. They might even become senile.

For me, all that matters is that I can make him laugh about the dolphins and their self awareness. Making him laugh makes me laugh and that is what it is all about because smiles are a girl's best friend and the djinn's worst enemy and this I learned

from the Arab to whom I'd been given
through means I cannot quite explain.