![]() “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. ![]() And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I’d been told about myself were true. In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other. ![]() I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance, both and neither. ![]() I blacked out occasionally and had dizzy spells often in those days, but this time was memorable because it appeared as though it wasn’t that the world was vanishing from my consciousness but that I was vanishing from the world. My own image drifted away from me into darkness, as though I was only a ghost fading even from my own sight. I steadied myself on the door frame just across the hall from the mirror, and then my legs crumpled under me. ![]() One day long ago, I looked at myself as I faced a full-length mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seem to retreat, as though I was vanishing from the world rather than that my mind was shutting it out. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |