Fragmented Reflection

It took half a lifetime to look in the mirror.

At some point I couldn't bear to see my reflection. I think it was sometime between angsty tween and teenage dirtbag.

I wasn't afraid of it; that's not why I refused to look.

There was something there, something that took a long time to decode. Even now I still try to trace the roots. Where the shame of existing planted itself deep. I didn't know what it was, but knew that I hated looking at it. Hated seeing the thing in the mirror that wore a face I didn't recognize.

I ignored it, avoided it, and dissociated from that disconnect.

My mouth was empty of the vocabulary needed to express what I could feel down to marrow. Like the word was running tauntingly away from me. Sitting at the tip of my tongue. Right at the moment of discovery, and suspended in a purgatory of social construction.

I was spiraling into myself like a dying star.

Two decades later, after discovering the language I needed, I braved the sight of my fragmentation. Taking selfies, looking in the mirror, trying to see which parts of me were hidden within familiar lines. I see my mother's nose, and my father's eyes. A mouth caught somewhere between the two.

I am stranded here, suspended again.

Wearing the features of an absentee father and estranged mother. I can still hear her in my laugh, and feel his anger under my skin. Generational trauma handed down, like an unwanted gift. Both have their reason for the neglect. Both had a hand in it.

Now I reclaim myself, and tend the wounds left behind for us all.

I don't remember when, but I know at some point, I found pieces of that reflection worth cherishing.

It took half a lifetime to find myself.