Mirror Gratitude

This is the second mirror I’ve had hanging here on the back of this closet door. The first one shattered almost exactly a year ago (2/4/2020) when I put my hand into it. Twice. In quick succession. Wound up with glass all over my bedroom floor. And lodged in my palm. Because evidently I hit inanimate objects like a karate and not a boxing, even though I am neither one nor the other, a karate nor a boxing, neither in real life nor on TV.

“I was rough-housing, playing with my dogs and tripped and fell against a mirror in my bedroom,” is what I told the doctor and several other staff at the emergency clinic, who asked me multiple times and in several different ways how this mean puncture-slice in the part if my hand near my wrist happened, how this flap of skin came to flap. And I’m sure they did not believe me, but they nodded at what I said as if they did and I looked them right in the eye and I did not feel bad about the lie, because they did not need to know the story, or how I’d been arguing with somebody I loved on the phone when it happened. The anger. The sadness. The crying. I already had two therapists I would tell later and that was plenty. And now you. And now you. Because I can’t not, for whatever reason.