Flaw Salad

A notion came to me Sunday afternoon as my lazy eyelashes brushed your salty skin, your pleasant scent filling every breath. Our arms and legs and sheets draped across each other, and your mouth hung open, just a little, which I regarded with the same affection as when the pets sigh and stretch their toes in their sleep. As you drowsed, my head filled with ideas and images. A horseshoe, namely. I thought, for an hour or so, that one’s moral progress in life might be conceived as a horseshoe. A bell curve would work just as well, or an arch or mountain — anything with an apex toward which one might climb. I picked a horseshoe. I like the shape of it, its flourishes and complexities. Morality is not a straightforward climb, and I cannot imagine a horseshoe being simple to scale. So, I picture a soul — any soul — every soul — making its careful way toward the top, measuring progress by peering across the gap toward the other side, which is a reflection mirrored by others. That’s the hard part to explain, really. In my mind, the left half of our horseshoe or arch or mountain is a path and the right half is merely an image, produced for you by the reactions and words of others, the social data that helps you gauge your progress. At the deep, dark bottom, in that little swirling curl, is black evil. It is a whirlpool that reflects back onto itself, and those caught in its turbulent thrash may need extreme measures to find their way out. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s take an average soul, an average distance from the apex of spiritual maturity. Someone in the middle. They look out to the sea of social response across the way, and what do they behold? From such a vantage, perhaps the position reflected back is hazy, full of contradictory information. The people in Average Person’s life are variably capable of serving as a mirror. Some offer clearer perspectives than others, each presenting information based on their own understanding of morality, as learned and mirrored from their own position on the climb. It is not easy to be a mirror, I reasoned, because there are so many ways to deceive. Consider for a moment the error of having a wrong impression. If you have misunderstood a person — perhaps having been misled by the dishonest reporting of another — you may reflect back to them an inaccurate image. Our work, then, is to interpret the conflicting data that helps us gauge our own position, to make the effort to climb, and to be the clearest, best mirror possible along the way. Does that make sense? I hope it does because it’s important for you to understand. Being a mirror is an often thankless job, and I contemplated this as you mumbled in your sleep. People do not like to see themselves. I know this because I sometimes show others too much. I see them recoil. Take the ex who cheated on me, for instance. We always intended to stay friends when we broke up, which was a foregone conclusion in most of our conversations on the topic — funny that the breakup took so long, in hindsight — but she could not face herself as reflected by me. People don’t like to behold that which disrupts. We are good at looking past information that requires great effort to address. A breakup is a difficult challenge. So is a moral blemish. As soon as you see it, you have to decide whether to fix or ignore it. Awful. Sometimes when I find a hairball on the floor, like the one back behind the dog food the other day, I am tempted to pretend I didn’t, to wait for you to notice it so you will clean it up instead. Many people take this approach to their conscience as well, to their view across the aisle. Ignorance is comfortable. Knowledge causes pain. Easier to look away. And yet, as I stared lazily toward the strips of sun peeking through the new faux-wood blinds I got for us, for our home — still strange to claim it, full as it is of your ghosts, though we gradually paint over their history with ours — my heart flooded with gratitude. Because you, my love, are the clearest mirror I have ever looked into. I do not always like what I see. You reveal my shortcomings — my hideous warts and festering wounds — in conflict and tears, even fear. I feel wild when I see your pain and, in turn, the monstrous parts of me. You slept through me pulling you closer and burrowing deeper into you as I tried to hide from the shame of this thought, this image of my small progress up the horseshoe, the long path ahead, the work I must yet do. It was not lost on me how safe I still felt there in the dwindling afternoon, lying in our bed — ours — in your arms, even as I faced the shadows. You do that for me. As a mirror, you show everything. That’s how I know there’s good still here, a path forward for me, because you stand steady long enough for me to see it. You are brave in that way. In many ways, actually. I hope to show them to you, the glitter and shine and warmth of you. I hope to learn to reflect you accurately, to cleanse myself of the jealousies and anxieties that darken your view, to hold the totality of you in one unblemished image: beautiful, radiant, talented, kind. Sometimes you doubt whether I trust you, and it’s true I fear that any attractive hand along your path will be the one you grab, the one that pulls you from me. I know this ugly part of myself because you show it to me, and please let this sink in: I trust what you show me. Not every mirror is one worth looking into, but yours always is. As I lay in your arms listening to our playlist — the one you made for afternoons like these — I envisioned us climbing together, hand in hand, across lifetimes. Today we have ants and gender and a cruel, chaotic society. We have laundry. We have a new Nintendo Switch. We have car rides and movies and 40-odd pounds of cat and dog. We have Phantogram. We have laughter. In the next life, will we find each other again? I like to think we will, that we are cosmic travelers bound to help one another up the horseshoe, until one day we reach the top. What happens there I cannot guess, but I expect you to find out alongside me. Until then, imperfect as we are, we climb. At least, that was the idea I had on Sunday afternoon in our dirty sheets, in our unkempt bedroom, in our dilapidated house, in our beautiful shared life. I nuzzled into your bare chest then and kept this letter until I knew how to write it.