The Rites of Longing Tommy Chisholm Every experience is a miniature big bang. Expanding outward away from the initial moment of combustion, moving farther away from where it set motion. Creating endless possibilities, yet only one course of action. Memory is the recording of experience to film. As each miniature bang blows one after another the earliest recordings are muted by sheer overabundance. When we watch the old reels, we find them pockmarked, full of holes. We patch the holes with the piecemeal tape on the cutting room floor. They’re not perfect, but they’re as close as we’re going to get. It doesn’t matter where I am. At Cowen Park under a big leaf maple I weigh what this inner voice is, what this subconscious mind of mine serves. The late-afternoon sun warms my forearms through a network of leaves and twigging branches. The perpetually damp earth is still saturated after so many months of rain. My ass is damp. But it will be damp biking back uphill regardless. My eyes close. The distant sunlight spit shines my eyelids pink. What is this voice? Where is it coming from? I wonder what it is to even have this ability, how its changed, whether it is the essence of my identity. The real me. The full me. The essence which is ever starting, pausing, moving and morphing. It doesn’t matter where I am. The cotton sheets, thinly striped in blue and white, are cold on my bare skin. I writhe around under the hulking black-walnut brown comforter fortifying each side of my body. With my feet I fold the bottom of the blanket into a pocket, dig in deep with legs reinforcing the pocket into a deep catacomb, and lock in the frozen feet: the ritual now complete. I close my eyes. Every night another hour, or two, or three, of lying here paralyzed, awake. Sleepless despite weariness. Isolated in the binding blanket, in a pitch black bedroom. Am I anything else but voice? Is the voice embodied, does it take physical form in this space? Here in darkness the voice produces no sound. Only in the mirror does the voice take shape. Mirrors, the place where left is right and right is left, the place where I’ve never had the slightest sense of depth, the place where I fixate on unwanted hairs—every unsightly blemish and pore, and yet the plane where my subconscious is born. In the grass or under the covers that voice is always my inmost spectre, laying dormant, hovering over waking life. And this spectre only possesses a face, a body, when I gaze into the mirror. What is a mirror? In antiquity, mirrors were made from solid sheets of bronze or silver and were prone to corrosion. For the last five hundred odd years, mirrors have been made by applying a metal coating to the backside of a piece of plate glass. Surely, mirrors are objects of vanity: a tool to aid our narcissism as well as our self-loathing. At the domestic intersection of the animal-world and the human, mirrors keep rodent and bird pets company. These puny little guys appear to not have the mental capacity to differentiate between themselves and the image in the mirror, effectively keeping themselves company. The physical body they see is not their own, but that of their only friends and neighbors. I find it a bit haunting, to be kept company by the mirror’s own deception. Mirrors are carriers of light. They absorb it and bounce it back in new angles; left is right and right is left. Humans share this trait with the mirror. We are all creatures of light. If our universe is truly traceable to a point of extreme density and heat, a point of combustion where all light was born, a point where all light surged away and spread itself across the universe, a point which set our cosmos in motion; then we are all decedents of light. Light which pierces abyssal darkness and momentarily forces it away. This is our affinity to light and our aversion to darkness. We are like moths to flames. As carriers of the light it is our nature to traverse the unknown and illuminate it. The light bearers won’t stand for unending darkness; as carriers—creatures—of the light, the ones who must blind darkness itself, they’re gift is in reinterpreting the light, making it their own and shinning it back into the void. Where left becomes right and right can become left. Though mirrors are carriers of light, they’re kinship is stronger with non- human animals. Much like the lowly chameleon, that reptile incapable of an authentic self, a mirror is only capable of replicating its surroundings. Then what happens when two chameleon-light-bearers face one another? I imagine two mirrors pressed together at their wooden frames, holding a negative space between the two panes, where all light escapes. Their lack of reflection is nothingness and in the darkness they are one with the lightlessness. Do they fail to function, or is this chameleon kiss, this lovers embrace drenched in the dark, only meant for two? Mirrors are secret keepers. A spy’s accessory for stealthily seeing around corners. In the negative plane between the coated plate glass, does the mirror take on any physicality? Is it possible to steal a glance? I know no way to shine, to sneak a light, onto their embrace without the two just chameling, reflecting that bulb, flame, or chemiluminescence. When I meet the spectre in the mirror I plug into a linear path. I piece my past together, up to the present. I was born, I grew into the person staring there, and I will die—and I always assume I’m in the middle of the path. It’s hard to make sense of it as a linear path: the more I try to sequence the events of my own history, the more skeptical I become. Whenever I visualize the timeline, the more I feel like I’m repeating words ad-nauseum and losing all sense of meaning. And yet I return to the mirror to organize time, time and again. Walking down the hall I catch my young reflection in the bathroom mirror. I enter Lindsay’s room, stepping into the carpeted bedroom from the basement’s cold cement floor. Standing at the foot of her dresser, the top right corner of the mirror reads, I LOVE STEVEN, in purple puff paint. My eyes descend into the image staring back, and still descending, meet the sink, and notice a pair of scissors left of the porcelain. The room is dim and the lights aren’t needed. The dull afternoon sun throws shade down the hallway, into the bedrooms, the bathroom. I pick up the scissors with my right hand. I look back at my shadowed complexion, pull a tuft of bangs upward, chop, and let the bowl cut fall back into place. My forehead looks like its missing a tooth. I put down the scissors and worry that it’s going to be noticeable. I brush the hair from side to side; I decide, nobody will probably even notice. In doubt I wonder how to repair the damage. Make more cuts? It’s not that bad right? Mom won’t even notice. I hope she won’t. Is my hair getting darker? Is it getting red? I really hope I’m not getting red hair. Please just turn a normal color like brown. Didn’t it used to be an even lighter blond? When did the color change? Have my eyes always been blue? When did I get this tall? I don’t ever feel like I’m growing, but I used to be shorter. I used to be a baby. But I don’t remember being a baby. How did a baby become me? Is that really the person I’ve always been? This is the body I’ve always had. But how do I really know I’m me? That that is the person I’ve been all my life. I stand in front of the mirror. Replay my first peek. In this gaze I exist out of time. I am simultaneously a mischievous child and a dumbfounded adult: standing on two planes. Once I’ve seen that spectre, I can’t unsee it. Surely, I’m just strange and nobody else stares in mirrors wondering who they are. I back away from the dresser nervously; wipe up the hair from the countertop, flush it down the toilet. The confrontation with self in a mirror happens continuously throughout life. It’s an experience I seldom seek, but the confrontation is available at every reflection of my image. I do have the ability to ignore the spectre, but on occasion it catches me while shaving, while plucking unibrow hairs, while popping zits. I catch myself staring. Still asking the same questions. Still having no answers. Still bearing isolation. Still suspecting myself extraordinary. Still shying away in anxiousness. Mining the past, while examining the present, I’m struck by the fiction my mind creates. The moment I stood in front of a mirror, cut a piece of my own hair, worried about the consequences, and discovered the spectre, is a collection of memories strung together. I’m simultaneously in a bathroom and my big sister’s bedroom, physically impossible, but completely feasible in the unreliable realm of associative memory. What’s even more telling is that in writing this memory, rewriting, editing, revising; reading it publicly, and agonizing over every minute detail, I’ve come to accept it as actual, as factual.