Repetition

Sometimes if I repeat a word several (many) times, I lose track of its meaning. The familiarity of the sounds themselves, what they mean when they come together, just leaves me. It’s the same when I look in a mirror. I can look, and look, and look, and look so harshly and with such scrutiny that I lose sense of what all these tiny pieces mean as a whole.

“Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole.”

Scrutiny is the right word, I think. As long as I can remember I’ve kept mirrors around me. Looked in them as I passed. (Or didn’t pass.) In windows on the walk to school, in my bathroom as I got ready for the day, in my mind’s eye in moments lost to imaginings. Seeing myself, not just on my own terms, but considering how everyone else was seeing me. Over and over.

This face is unfamiliar somehow. My face. I’ve examined it so many times that it has become foreign.

I don’t know what to expect when I look in the mirror. If I will want to see the immigrant. (Emigrant?) If I will recognize him at all, or if he too won’t be subject to this suspicion.

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