The Face in the Mirror

I recently heard that wormholes in space could bend time so that the present could reach through and touch the past. What would I say to her if I could reach through and touch her?

I can see her. She is absolutely beautiful. She stands with her young curves just perfect. They have not yet been touched by age or wrinkles, or stretched by the birth of her children, or worn by the stress of trying so hard to hold everything together. She appears confident. Her clothing chosen carefully, her hair permed, curled just right. The smell of Aqua Net, a cloud encompassing the room. She has learned to apply her makeup to enhance the beautiful hazel eyes and long lashes she was blessed with, instead of covering every feature she possesses. Pity she cannot see what I see now. She is amazing.

What would I tell her? Would she listen if I told her how beautiful she is? Would she understand it if I said she is worth so much more than her body parts? That love is not measured by compliance? Would she accept that anyone who makes her feel small is not worthy of her heart? If I told her her parents’ anger was another shape of love - fierce, clumsy, terrified love - would she hear me? Or would she only hear the doubt she has already decided is truth?

Would she listen?

I step closer to the edge of the wormhole. She is examining herself, looking for flaws I cannot see. “Stop!” I tell her. “You are brilliant.”

She shakes her head and looks away from the image. I can hear the voice inside her — the one she thinks is her own — whisper back, No, you’re not.

Years later, her mother’s words would still rise uninvited in the quiet. “No nice boy…The choices you have made… “ would echo in her mind and in her heart. What sins can never be forgiven? What choices can never be taken back? At 16, is it possible to have earned damnation for eternity?

If I could reach her, I would not warn her about the boy. I would place forgiveness in her hands before shame dug in and changed everything.

Before the music blurred and the room tilted.

Before she followed him down the hallway, because being wanted felt like oxygen.

Before the coat room door shut.

She would wake in a pile of discarded coats to find her skirt askew, laughter drifting from somewhere down the hall.

Instead of winning back her teenage crush, she was crushed by it.

She decided that night that the voice of doubt had been right all along.

She would not tell anyone. Not because she didn’t have words — but because she believed she had forfeited the right to protest.

Monday, at school, the word was he had a new girlfriend. She heard it whispered between the lockers. At lunch, he sat next to the new girl. He saw her walk into the lunchroom and did not meet her eye. His laughter became too loud. His voice over-animated.

She did not ask questions. First, she stopped looking at herself in the mirror. Then, she put away her brightly colored clothes. Then she stopped fixing her hair. Eventually, she stopped asking for anything at all.

She is the girl I wish I could reach - the one who is just beginning to fade into the background. I would raise up her chin. I would hold her until all of her tears stopped. I would take the blame from her and place it exactly where it belongs.

She is the girl in the mirror I love the most.

She carried that version of herself wherever she went for years. When a man came along who wore penny loafers, drove a nice car, and spoke with confidence about his college plans, she fell for him. He appeared confident and self-assured, all feelings she had lost in a small room years before.

She married him. On her wedding day, her father told her two things. The first was that she looked like a beautiful china doll. I have looked back on those pictures several times over the years, and he was right. She looked perfect.

The second he quietly spoke just before he walked her up the aisle.

“You don’t have to go through with this.”

It was a statement she would not understand for decades.

It was the little things. Like when his mother criticized her cooking and he bought her a cookbook for their first Christmas to help her learn. Or the mornings when he would dig through the dirty laundry. “I don’t have any clean socks.” and she would apologize even though they worked the same hours.

It was the night she wore lingerie that was ignored as he turned away without acknowledging - or pretending not to.

It was the birthday when the gift was not intimate enough and the performance did not include things he liked.

It was the business trip he returned from with a briefcase heavier than when he left. Glossy pages spilled onto the bed. Her cheeks burned.

“They seem to like doing things you won’t do,” he said.

And it was the weeks in those early years when he would come home, eat dinner, and move through the house without touching her at all.

No argument. No explanation. Just absence.

Decades followed. The “why don’t you’s” and “how come you won’ts” accumulated until she barely spoke at all.

The girl from the coat room was now a mother of four, a wife of twenty-five years — and she felt exactly the same.

One day, while standing in the bathroom, arguing again, she looked at him and yelled, “I just don’t understand why you treat others so different than you treat us.”

Without thinking of the implications, he replied, “I can’t treat other people the way I treat you. I’d lose my job.”

At that moment, I touched her. It was the slightest touch. But she felt it. She knew. All the years of being corrected. Compared. Found lacking.

He knew. And now, she did too.

That was the day something shifted. Years later, she would recognize that moment as the first crack in the wall she had been living behind.

She did not leave that afternoon. She did not pack a bag. She did not raise her voice again.

But neither she did apologize.

And when she looked in the mirror that night, she did not look away.

I see her. I am on the other side. I know where she is headed.

I may have been wrong earlier.

This — The woman who finally understood what her father meant — this is the one.