//------------------------------//
// Where There is Knowledge, It Will Pass Away 
// Story: We Will All Be Changed 
// by Cynewulf 
//------------------------------//

It hadn’t been that bad.


Honestly, it hadn’t been. Not really. I knew what bad was like. It was like yelling. Arguing. Not arguing, but arguing, really fighting and not just bickering. Bad means you leave and don’t want to see someone again. If anything, I wanted to see her again more than anything. I wanted to fly down the stairs, crest the hill, toss myself into the shitty car and drive until I was at her apartment. I wanted to burst in there and redo the whole day, reconstruct it like a crime scene. We would retrace our every step and analyze every word, letting each sentence go by only once we had workshopped it to perfection. 


Our afternoon would have been golden, mathematically perfect. But the problem with that kind of trial and error is that it takes time and it has to happen at the pace of the real, and it is so awfully slow to do things in real time. In a lab that means waiting. In games it means selecting an option after saving and testing a route. In life? In life, it seems to mean that you have unpleasant afternoons and feel like a failure for an indeterminate amount of time, and then the feeling fades and it sits in the bottom of your stomach like a rock. 


Laying in bed, watching the sun slide in through the blinds and illuminate strips along my jeans, I can’t help but let my mind wander. Images and figures parade in front of my vision like ghosts, half-there in the mind’s eye. Half finished projects, old forgotten books, Rarity driving, her arms outstretched and her hair in the wind with the convertible top down, the pile of papers filling my desk from our last group project, the hair on the floor of the salon as I asked for a mirror.


The haircut probably started this. What prompted me? 


I got it cut in the height of summer. Maybe it was the heat, the itchy sweltering humidity, the way it clung to me and turned my long hair into a prison. It clung to my face, it got into everything. I hated it. I’d never hated it so much as this summer. Not that I’d always hated it, or always loved it. Had I?


I went into that salon wanting a trim. It was the hottest day on record since my parents were my age--I checked--and I slouched into the too-bright building in sweaty, grungy everything. I hadn’t slept in 40 hours. School and caffeine and stress and the sun and the humidity had conspired against me. And I sat down in that chair in the cold salon and I looked at myself, unshowered and unhappy, and heard that familiar question (So, how much are we taking?) asked so jovially and I snapped, I think. I blurted out, I want it short. And she replied, a bit baffled, how short? And I, just as baffled, just looked at the hairdresser in the mirror and said, short as a boy’s. 


And it was, in fact, pretty short.


I stumbled out of that building in shock, I think. But when I stood on the sidewalk, and felt the breeze, and felt lighter, I couldn’t help but laugh. I felt like I’d tunneled out of some prison yard.


Rarity had been horrified. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest way to say it. But she hadn’t liked the new haircut at all. She’d moaned and lamented and generally mourned my hair, and in truth I had felt bad about cutting it when she did. She loved my hair. I actually loved that she loved it. I probably kept it long for as long as I did specifically because she loved it. But we didn’t fight about my hair. 


In truth, with time I let it grow out just a bit, and she grew to even like it. She smiled and called me her little butch and ran her fingers through it. I didn’t like being called that, and didn’t know why, but I liked the touch of her hand and the sound of her voice. And I liked the breeze and the lightness.


I gained weight over the summer. Rarity only commented once, specifically because my old clothes were obviously becoming uncomfortable, and suggested that she could go shopping with me if I wanted. Something about that made me nervous, which was new. I said I’d be fine. She never shamed me about it. She worried about the acid reflux I picked up from the coffee and the constant snack food and the long nights, but she never made me feel like I was wrong or a bad person.


I sat up, and looked at the tall mirror in the corner of my room. My reflection gazed back at me. God, but I looked like shit. I looked like a kid trying to wear their parent’s clothes. My eyes had bags under them from lack of sleep. My hair was a mess. The button-up wasn’t the right size. My jeans were way too loose, bought from the men’s section of the Walmart in a hurry.


I grimaced, and the me in the mirror grimaced back.


Maybe she was right to be weird about this. About how I looked. Maybe it was bad, that I was this way. Not that I knew what this way was. 


I hate mirrors. I genuinely hate them. If I didn’t need one, I wouldn’t ever look at that stupid reflection. I wouldn’t look at that person’s gangly limbs and frail frame and weird face that never felt like my face. No matter how much I reached up and touched it, no matter how I watched the hands in the mirror move, it was never my face. It was someone else’s. I tried to explain it to Rarity once. She was working in that boutique in high school, and was adamant about helping me look good for the dance that I mostly wanted to go to because I wanted to be with friends. She’d loaded me down with things to wear and pushed me into the changing room with gleeful energy and I’d tried things on and wandered out to show her.


And at some point, I said something about the mirror. I’m not even sure what I said, but she cocked her head to the side and said something like, why darling, how could you not love seeing your beautiful face? My heart melted, I forgot the mirror, I went back in side. She has a way of doing that. It’s easy for Rarity to charm me, and I love when she does. Her natural grace just overwhelms me sometimes.


I tried again, not long after the haircut. We were sitting on her bed. Lazy afternoon, the a/c purring in the background, her hand on my naked back, my feet in the soft carpet, her gaudy mirror like a begilded monolith before me. I said, you know that I hate these? I always have. I look terrible in them.



And she’d replied, why was that? And I fumbled words, years of contemplation coming apart like wet paper in my hands as I tried to put it into words. I looked wrong in them. They showed the wrong thing.


I must have sounded odd, because she sat up, and when she laid her head on my shoulder the image I saw changed. I didn’t look right. But she did. I smiled despite myself.


Twilight, you are a beautiful woman, she’d said. And… It didn’t make me happy. I must have looked so shocked! I don’t know. I was too busy looking at her eyes in the reflection. You’ve interalized a lot of terrible things. We all do, growing up.


It’s true! We’d talked about that before. You grow up in a world that demands you have a certain body and of course you come out a little skewed. I remember Rarity, pointing her wine glass at me across the bed, talking about the pressure to be perfectly slim yet full in all the exactly right places, how she loathed it, how it made her feel miserable growing up. And I got that! But. What I felt wasn’t that. I didn’t look at myself in that mirror and think that I needed more curves. Hell, if anything I had too many. I hated every single one of them. I hated how they labeled me. Those curves, those hips, that silhouette forces me into the tight confines of other people’s expectations which I never consented to. I never consented to being talked about the way they talk about me. I never signed off on being seen this way. 


I used to be mad that I had to hang out with girls who didn’t share my interests. I grew up, I got over the “not like other girls” mindset that’s so toxic, but I didn’t feel differently. Just because I didn’t resent other girls didn’t mean I liked being sorted into a box with them. It wasn’t a bad box. It wasn’t about it being a bad box. The person I see in the mirror is in that box, but I am not that person. Or something. 


I watch my shoulders sag. This is foolish. I have a school work to finish and a study group to meet up with tonight in the library. I have too much on my plate to stare at mirrors and ask questions about nothing.


So I don’t. I get up and head to my desk. The mirror isn’t going anywhere. It never does.