Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest

RR & A

I want to experience youth with the eyes of age and go through age with the vivacity natural to the young. Nature will not allow that to happen. The young must burn with passion and the old must swim in the turbulent waters of pointless wisdom.

I imagined a life going on within the mirror which is close to my own and as distant as the horizon. I slept but the mirror did not. It stayed awake night after night waiting for me to approach it so that I could see the truth of what I am in those countless failures in my attempts at loving. Breaking mirrors and a fragmented life haunt my sleep. Each time I go to bed I feel I am practicing a ritual leading to the performance of my dying.

I never understood why my face had that look of someone speaking from the house of the dead. It was Faustus from the eternal fires quite at home with his lover Helen and his master Mephistopheles. The doubt that was never a precondition to faith and the lust that gave the illusion of happiness–these are the things my lonely heart dwells in.

My face is the face that holds within itself every other face on earth, the face that has failed dreams written on it, the face on which destiny has carved itself out, the face of destiny, my face is its own biographer, a face which narrates endlessly the story of faces that played a part in the life of this face, this is the face I am born with and have not yet learnt to live with, I am not the maker of this face but merely its custodian, everything I do, I do keeping this face in mind, if tonight I am leaving this world I want the world to remember that this is a face like no other.

RR & A is a writer and independent scholar. He completed his doctorate at the University of Mississippi in 1997.

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