After a long day’s work, I find my eyes looking past myself in the mirror. I look at the person staring back at me, looking at his fatty chest, his neck, and finally his face. At times, it takes a moment to recognize the man in the mirror is myself — and each time it takes even longer, with the more wrinkles I earned.
If a scar is proof of struggle, then what would a wrinkle be? A wrinkle can appear due to time or stress, though rarely, also happiness.
I look at the wrinkles under my eyes, ones that’ve been there ever since I was able to think, though they’ve become more visible as the years waned on them. Surely, there was an instance or two that didn’t help, like the time I used to be a door-to-door salesman.
Before then, I was still a scared child — fear was an integral tidbit of my everyday life, even more so when I’d moved to the city. I had no idea what dangers lurked out there, and what or where to avoid. Yet I found a job that promised riches at the cost of hard work. Hard work I found, yet riches there were none. Over the period of a few months, my savings burned up and away, and I wandered forwards, constantly on treks of no sleep to unfamiliar places, to promote products nobody wanted to hear about.
Though some laughs were had here and there, the experience was a backhanded lesson from life, which had toughened me up, at the cost of these pronounced wrinkles.
Yet, those aren’t the only ones that tell my story, as the ones by my cheeks show my continued laughter. Sure, I don’t seem to laugh by myself anymore, but where friends are found, good times are to be had.
I smile at the mirror, seeing how much more pronounced those are compared to the other ones. I chuckle, noting how funny my visage must be to strangers who like to read faces.
Not to mention, there are other wrinkles on me, ones that don’t drag a lesson behind them, or ones that aren’t from good times either. They’re just there, existing. The lines on my neck, the ones forming above my brow, these are the ones that most people see, yet almost everyone gets to have.
All these weird flaps of skin on the thing that is I, yet it won’t be the last ones to show. Perhaps I’m not meant to recognize myself completely, for I am ever-changing, yet constant, like the water on a river.
I smile, eyeing those wrinkles once more. That is what I am, and that is why the person in the mirror may be forever unknown to me.
