Retrospection, introspection, inspection and detection…
I shouldn’t cut my hair without my glasses on, and yet it came out fairly well. Finding and employing spectacles after the fact is finding and employing guts and honesty as well to face so clearly the naked body in the mirror; the one that serves merely as a pedestal to display the newly hedge-trimmed frontyard of the mind.
The mind is shaken by the image that is given it by eyes that have not lingered on it long or in a while. A slight shudder shivers over convolutions of the brain. So this is what it is, I think, the sight of middle age; when body finally catches up with mind. Yet not so bad, except for wrinkles in the dryness of the skin, but shapely still, and more in fact; gravity has helped complete what somehow stopped in puberty, and indeed, I may well think to wear a bra. Here, at least, is how I should have looked some thirty years ago. But then again, I see friends pendulous and petulant with crevices in shoulder blades arcing forward, robbing inches from their stance. This is how they started; this is how I’ll end.
Breathing in and stretching to my real imagined height, the one I am in daydreams and at night; embarrassed by the thought, not bad at all, and for a moment in my mind the times have melded into one shining time and disappears again as quickly as I exhale.
Within the steaming flow of shower spray, I smile; for though only I saw for a blip of time where the space of me was perfect and content, the image is one I’ll live my life through till the end.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology