Reflections of You and Me
Looking below the surface
I had been with him for almost three years, maybe two and a half if you counted the two major breakups and the multiple smaller ones, when my mother got fed up. She was in my bedroom when she heard us at the door, him quietly bullying and me quietly crumbling. Suddenly my living room was the O.K. Corral and she was standing there like Doc Holliday, guns blazing. She ordered him to sit on the couch and he shrank into the brown microfiber cushions as if he could become part of the furniture.
Her anger — a bit of which was directed my way too, and rightly so — gave me the strength I lacked to finally break it off once and for all. But better was what she told me, shaking her head and sighing.
“People aren’t mirrors to reflect you back at yourself, Leah. That’s not what love is. Flawed as he is, screwed up as his perspective might be, it’s his. He’s got his own wants and needs, just like you do. He’s not something you can project your own image onto, and neither are you. You both have to see each other as people, and I don’t think either of you can.”
It’s very hard to see our own selfishness. Of course it is. That’s part of the gig, right? You can be selfish because you just have no idea, or if you do have an idea you’re able to ignore it or push past it. The other person will certainly want what you want, need what you need, think what you think. How could any reasonable person not? And if they don’t, well, god it feels so good to get what you didn’t realize you were missing.
I think about the people I’ve met, my ex and others, imagine them as beautiful mirrors with little arms and legs, and me projecting all my own desires onto them. I know too how it feels, to be so shiny.
Sometimes I think about that ex, try to think about what it would be like to go back in time and understand him better, get a grip on his interiority in whatever weird — because I mean knowing him, it probably was weird — form it took. But I can’t do it, can’t imagine it. He had to be my mirror to eventually reflect the worst of me back at myself. Otherwise how could I see my inability to grasp the depth and meaning of someone else’s desires and fears, including the terrifying desire to be loved and treasured as a person, flaws and all.
