`````There is something mystical about the bathroom mirror at four in the morning. Nothing "Magical Mystery Tour" or Alice in Wonderland. Rather, it is all harsh lights and sharp focus; it is reality magnified ten fold. Every fault is highlighted-with little arrows pointing-just in case you missed it. If it were merely one's physical defects it would perhaps be tolerable, but here comes every "should have", "could have" and guilt feeling dredged up to be newly raked over.
`````There is a dump in New York City called Fresh Kills. I have a vision of all the bad stuff in my psyche just lying there in the open air and festering, waiting for me to pick over and analyze it...at four in the morning.
`````The mirror at that time is main lined sodium pentathol. There is no hiding from that light. No detective in a dime store novel ever had such an effective interrogation device.
`````That mirror is like The Magic Eight Ball; turn on the light and POW! You're confronted with some truth that you didn't want to know. It's the thing you didn't realize was bothering you, yet here it is. It's the reason you're in that room, awake, at four A.M. in the first place.
I know that every morning (I have to get up before the crack of dawn most days) I see how I'm starting to age and well it sucks. But that's life.
ReplyDeleteOh I haven't kept in touch with the writer of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, mainly because I don't know what to say to the man other than "good job". I'm a dork, I know.
Still, it's quite the compliment for him to get in touch with you. He must really have thought highly of the way you wrote.
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