How I Look in New York

I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror in a very long time. So long, that I’d grown a full beard in the interim, with a moustache that curled over my top lip entirely. I knew that, of course, I’d been fighting the moustache every time I ate, and chewing on it in those moments before sleep when every thought I’d ever avoided dropped onto my forehead like a cartoon anvil. But, it was rather shocking to see it on my face that evening, because if I’d been even a bit more sleep-deprived, I wouldn’t have known I was looking at myself. I would have thought that I was looking at a framed photograph or a film of a worn-out Greek man who’d been down on his luck for a while, dreading a long winter on the streets.

It wasn’t the first time I’d abstained from my own reflection to save my sanity, but it had been more than a decade since I’d last dreaded mirrors, and back when I was 17, I’d had someone to help me shave. In Manhattan, in the last year of my twenties, I looked as alone as I was, and like I’d spent all the time I should have been grooming myself getting into fights instead. I’ve forever hated the rugged assumption that my scars bring to my face, but they felt proper highlighted amongst the hair, making me appear as someone my father would have kept employed: someone who would do anything for six figures, without a pesky moral in sight. Even worse than that, when I pulled all my hair back into a knot so I could wash my face without getting it wet, I looked just like the man himself, just like Brigg Jones.

I’d always told people that if I grew a beard, I’d look like him. No one believed me, because my father was light everywhere I am dark and straight everywhere I am curly. I know I got my mother’s features and her autumn palette, but it is the shape of my face, and the outline of everything beneath the skin which I got from Brigg. The beard blurs and distracts away from everything that’s different.

Rather than fall into a dramatic mess of comparison, though, seeing our similarities made me laugh.

“What’s it fucking matter?” I exclaimed aloud to my reflection. “You absolute bellend, your problems are so small. Nothing matters in the Shadow Realm of Fuck-all. Not Brigg’s ugly mug, not comfortable-looking beds, not even running away.”

I grimaced at myself for a proper minute while I scrubbed guilt off of my clean hands, until I came to a hint of grace. I looked unstable and unapproachable, completely free of the golden handcuffs I’d once had of being ‘too handsome,’ or whatever it was that the perverts always said. With an unkempt landscape of scars and a self-loathing scowl, maybe I could go unbothered as a moaning phantom for the rest of my life. 

A tiny pang of hope sang out in the darkest reaches of my mind that perhaps I could become someone completely new.