Encounters with the Mirror

I like to think of a girl,
As she tumbled and crawled through her bed chamber,
With wobbly little feet, she fell onto the cold wall of her long passage mirror.

In the pale glass, she stared into her wondrous brown eyes,
That wandered farther and rested upon a strange tuft of curly hair,
How odd it looked, standing tall and wobbly upon her forehead with a bit of flair.

She blew a sweet draught of air in the mirror and watched its frenzied sway,
Right then, a flighty smile danced across her little mouth.
It sweeps her away onto other conquests, and so she continued her scramble south.

I like to think of a girl,
As she hopped and skipped across the patio with birds.
She chanced upon her animated reflection, while jumping high, on an antique mirror resting on a ledge perched.

With every leap, she beheld a different expression;
Sometimes sticking out her tongue in playful zest, sometimes narrowing her eyes in a cunning slant,
And sometimes drawing up a rueful expression, impersonating her aunt.

She soon grew weary of her ingenious game,
Arrested her motion momentarily to catch her breath, only to leap one last time,
And this time, she blew into the mirror a pretty, pouty kiss, like one she had seen on “Partners in Crime”.

I like to think of a girl,
As she strolled down a shopping alley alongside her mother,
Amidst all the splashy dresses luring her gaze, she caught her own display in a tinted mirror.

She considered grudgingly the huge zit lounging on her pink cheek,
Then sneakily averted her eyes to admire the entire beauty of her mum.
She secretly longed for that crimson pout and her decisively plump bosom.

That night, she stole some lip lacquer from her mum’s vanity trove and tiptoed back into her turf,
To stuff socks into her sprouting chest and paint her lips in forbidden red, unloading her young lips’ gloom.
She smiled to herself, for she couldn’t wait to be a woman in all her glory and bloom.

I like to think of a girl,
As she came home late evening from a midsummer day in a fairytale,
Her heart bolstering with emotions, she races to the powder room, leaving behind a furious mud trail.

She catches herself anew in her reflection.
She can see her glimmering eyes, her hair unruly caught in the tangles of desire, her lips flaming with a crimson speck.
“The kiss sealed it all…To know of love in its fullness, to feel his warm breath on my neck…”

Through the lightness of her fingers, she traced his gentle touch clung to her skin;
She let herself be swept to a foreign shore,
And to the mirror, she said, “I'm beautiful, I'm unravelled but I'm whole no more.”

I like to think of a girl,
As she dragged herself to embrace a new dawn, wearied with a hollow feeling, somewhere in the depths unknown.
She stands still, taking stock of a stranger in her bedside mirror, with smudged purple beneath her eyes and an odd palor of cheekbone.

She attempts to scrape away the despondent haze with her hands tremulous, when they hit her — the shards.
They were the remains of a misty night broken into a million pieces with the brutality of words.

She looked at her reflection that now bared her anguished soul.
She muffled a scream as the world caved in beneath her feet.
What began as a dewy midsummer day is now a faded grey leaf, veiled with the mystery of a love saga frozen incomplete.

I like to think of a girl,
On the brink of becoming a woman, as she delicately floated and sparkled down the stairway of the biggest day of her life.
She caught her angelic reflection in the passageway mirror with the restraint of a to-be wife.

And she continued to look on, oblivious of arresting her onlookers with mouths agape with admiration.
They were in awe of her divinity rustling in silk and dazzling in golden glitter.
But all she saw was her veiled innocence and her anxiety to entwine with another.

In the fields of corn, amidst the mist of rainbows, they’d dance to rapturous violins.
With arms wide open, they’d usher in a new tomorrow when she and her other half would be set free,
To paint the pallid sky the colour of their dreams in sweet surrender of a whirlwind promise underneath a peach tree.

I like to think of a woman,
As she strolled down a shopping alley alongside her daughter,
She didn't see her magnificent, full-bodied frame that mesmerized her adolescent girl; oh how she dodged her display in the tinted mirror.

She was busy living a deception of ‘perfect body image’ that discarded her from the ‘Desirable Woman’ sorority,
She loathed her body and tortured her flesh in corsets.
She walked tirelessly on treadmills and for her hard-earned guilty pleasure, she ate a small square of chocolate;

Oh dear woman, she knows what she’s missing,
Farewell to the joy of ice-cream sundaes and hot, steaming bowls of rice.
If only she saw her reflection through the eyes of her daughter, she’d see a woman surpassed in real beauty, her beautiful curves and unblemished heart clothed in an ethereal guise.