Sketch

I wiped the fog off the mirror and stared at the stranger in it. He’s got the trapped look of a desperate man who tries valiantly to create something with what he has, with what he’s capable of; yet his eyes show a certainty, a resignation to an afterthought that he could fail.

He has a day old stubble that looks like it was dry-shaved. Footprints from crow’s feet can be seen walking along the fringes of the dark clouds beneath his weary eyes. There were blemishes on his face that time and travel have shaped over the years to show the places he’s been to, the places he loved, and those places that loved him back. He had craters of open pores for all those nights that would have nothing to do with beds, pillows, and couches; where dreams (even nightmares) have gone somewhere, refusing to stay; whose twisting dawns offered no slumber, just a barren boulevard of wakefulness and uneasy imaginings.

But his features had a familiarity to it. The same familiarity that shows in the distorted reflection in the hollows of spoons, a kind of familiarity that one is forced to carry– like an unwelcome hitchhiker.

I studied his face intently; my gaze an index finger sliding across the pages of a blind man’s book, slithering through every contour where shadows are sometimes hidden. As I rode these contours, I find myself bathed in a tearful wetness that was suddenly there, gushing forth, perhaps in remorse, as I touched my own skin, tracing the lines of the face I barely recognize.