The floor was packed on a Saturday night,
every surface lacquered, every surface bright,
the kind of crowd that came to be seen being seen,
each body a performance and the dance floor a screen
reflecting back exactly what it was asked to show –
a room full of mirrors putting on a show.
The beat dropped and the hands went up in rows,
the choreography of people who all know
the same approved moves, the same pre-cleared
emotional range, the same curated weird
that isn’t weird at all but the current agreed-upon
expression of the self that gets approved and drawn
into the feed, into the story, into the comment thread
where the affirmation lives when the body’s fed
its required dose of witnessed and desired –
a room of people who came in to be admired.
Hand mirrors, hand mirrors, everybody’s holding one,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, check your face before you’re done,
the song is about nothing and the nothing sounds so fine,
everybody’s beautiful in their own reflected shine,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, turning in the light,
the most important person in the room is you tonight,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, and the music doesn’t care –
it just gives the room something to look good to, standing there.
The DJ read the room and the room said more,
said give us the frequency that settles the score
between who I am and who the lighting says I am,
between the actual self and the Instagram
version I’ve been running for the past two years,
the version without the Tuesday afternoon fears,
without the bank statement, without the car
that needs the left rear caliper, without the scar
the last relationship left in the working tissue –
just the beat and the body and the look and the issue
of whether the angle of the phone is right,
whether the caption earns the image tonight.
Hand mirrors, hand mirrors, everybody’s holding one,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, check your face before you’re done,
the song is about nothing and the nothing sounds so fine,
everybody’s beautiful in their own reflected shine,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, turning in the light,
the most important person in the room is you tonight,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, and the music doesn’t care –
it just gives the room something to look good to, standing there.
He came in from the warehouse at the edge of town,
still carrying the week in the set of the shoulder down,
still carrying the four-to-midnight in the lower back,
and the room received him and the beat cut through the slack
of his exhaustion for exactly four minutes and twelve,
four minutes where the mirror showed him someone else,
someone whose body moved without the freight of it,
someone the light agreed with, and the weight of it
lifted for four minutes and he wasn’t fooled –
he knew what it was, knew the mirror was tooled
to flatter, knew the beat didn’t know his name –
but four minutes is four minutes and he came
for exactly that, for the temporary grace
of a room that briefly gave him back his face.
Hand mirrors, hand mirrors, everybody’s holding one,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, check your face before you’re done,
the song is about nothing and the nothing sounds so fine,
everybody’s beautiful in their own reflected shine,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, turning in the light,
the most important person in the room is you tonight,
hand mirrors, hand mirrors, and the music doesn’t care –
it just gives the room something to look good to, standing there.
The song ended and the room exhaled together,
the mirrors put away until the next good weather,
the lacquered surfaces resuming their indifference,
the crowd returning to its Tuesday-morning difference
from the people they had briefly and collectively been,
and the DJ loaded the next track and the scene
reset itself for another four minutes of grace,
another room full of people checking their own face,
and the mirror doesn’t judge and the beat doesn’t lie –
it just plays, and we just dance, and the mirrors catch the light.