The mirror in my room is meanest after midnight.
In daylight it is only glass, cheap and square and nailed a little crooked to the wall.
By day it gives me hair that will not listen, a shirt that fits wrong in the shoulders,
a face I know well enough to ignore.
Then night comes on and the whole room changes sides.
The lamp throws one yellow patch over the dresser.
The posters look half-alive.
The window turns black and gives nothing back.
My records lean in their stack like witnesses.
The mirror gets sharp.
I stand there longer than any sane person should,
pulling at my shirt, pushing my hair back,
trying out three different versions of the same expression
like maybe somewhere under my own face
there is a better one waiting to be found.
Older.
Harder.
Less easy to read.
The kind of face that would not get laughed at.
The kind of face girls would remember later.
The kind of face that looked like it had already survived something worth writing down.
Instead I get my own plain self
with a jaw not set enough,
eyes too quick to show whatever they are thinking,
and that one stupid look I get
when I am trying not to look like I care.
The bad part is I care about all of it.
The hair.
The shirt.
The angle of my mouth.
Whether I look weak.
Whether I look young.
Whether I look like I belong inside my own skin
or like I borrowed it from some better-built guy who came back for it.
I used to think growing up meant one day waking up
and feeling finished.
I thought there would be a morning
when I would walk past a mirror
and not stop.
That has not happened.
Some nights I think the mirror is lying.
Some nights I think it is the only thing in the room
that tells the whole ugly truth.
And some nights, the worst kind,
I think both can be true
and that is why I stand there so long
looking like a person
waiting to be introduced
to himself.