We look in the mirror, smearing viscous white sunscreen that leaves a sticky layer of the world on our pores through the day, and notice a line, a wrinkle, a sag.
We think, ‘oh, but that wasn't there before.’
But then, when we were young, we never bothered to look in the mirror, smearing pastes and creams to stop the sunlight coming in to soften, smoothen, and beautify the natural progression of multicellular destruction made apparent in us.
Programmed cell death.
Apoptosis.
Ageing.
Dying.
Slow and gradual it may be, but suddenly, a change occurs and we catalogue it amidst the daily routine as we do any other surprise, any other anomaly in the line of code we follow day to day, year to year. A change in the environment, in our subconscious, in ourselves.
We acknowledge it as a surprise that will leave our recollection the next time we take a shower and study our features in the frosting mirror.
There, a bruise, purple and tender, mars our pale elbow. The blood pooling into a thumb sized ball the shape of a robin's egg. The bread molds in the cupboard and the milk sours in the morning tea. The fruit softens and decays on the counter. The bruises heal and the scars turn silver with our hair. It’s a lingering taste of unpleasantness on the back of the tongue, bitter with tannin and rot.
The change we expected to leave hangs around like the fumes of cigarettes and car exhaust and too-strong cologne.
Pervasive.
The wind change will not come from the sea to sweep it away. This change will last, unlike the milk, the bread, and collections of inane perishables we fill our lives with. Short, like a mayfly’s life span. No, this change will stay forever, like an unwelcome guest that we can't help but be desperate to leave us in peace. It’s a ghost that keeps tugging on the back of our neck, a slowly tightening noose of umbilical cords and oxygen tubing.
And then, there.
The mirror is lit by weak afternoon sun squinting through opaque glass late on a Thursday evening.
Laugh lines around the eyes, illuminated by the long shadows of the dying sunlight in a purple sky.
Forehead lined with worry wrinkles from many late nights typing before the television light, deadlines to asinine projects now forgotten, anxiously buzzing on our minds that keep the Sandman from our bedroom door. The neck, the tops of the hands, the forearms, all freckled from open collars and short sleeves exposed to harsh afternoon glares spent in the peak hour traffic home from a long day.
Bare feet calloused on the heel. Old scars from an adventurous youth are silver and stark against unshaved legs and arms pockmarked with sunspots. Our eyes glass over with cataracts, slowly and gradually so we don’t notice at first how hard it is to see.
On the pale skin of the knee, a small wide scar. Phantom pains run through our bones as we remember the day, the dust of the sandy hill we tripped down and the sharp rock embedded in our flesh. We were only eight and alone in the playground, the blood running down our leg to stain our white socks as we limped away.
It hurt, but pain was a foreign shore we had not ventured to many times in our short, young life. We were proud of how we didn't cry, and excitement kept us walking up the next hill. We couldn't help but think what a great story we could spin of our battle wound, how the other children we desperately wanted to be friends with would gasp and coddle.
We were always desperate to be seen as children, always amongst the first to raise our hand even if we didn't know the answer, always eager to please, try new things, and talk to new people. We would blister our hands on the monkey bars, palms calloused and knees skinned, but would line up to test one another in spite. We used to try so many things. We weren't afraid of rejection or failure then. The world made us enthusiastic, giddy with youth and the possibilities of the day. We were always creative, playful in the extreme like someone had shaken us up as if we were cans of Coca-Cola and pulled back the metal with a squeal.
We used to smile when we woke up to our mother's soft nudging, whether it be cold and rainy, early on a weekday, or a warm Sunday morning with the scent of bacon and eggs stirring us from sleep.
We don’t smile at the dawn anymore. Our mother is not there to wake us or kiss us to sleep.
Decay is heavy in our mind now, rotted away with our giddiness. Our daydreams now scattered with our youth.
Apoptosis: falling off.
From the living room window we watch the trees become stricken of their red leaves. They fall in small flutters, collecting in the driveway. They stick to the car windscreen in the corner of our eye and join us on our way to primary school. Orange becomes red and bleeds to brown, the tree bark withers and is laid bare. Dry and dead, the leaves crunch underfoot, the worms eat the rot and fertilise the soil. By spring the flowers grow and the bees have come once more. It repeats for eternity, immortalising the flowers as they bloom and wither, bloom and wither.
Mothers and daughters.
Our face is the same, refracted back in a mirror mirage. Our hearts touch when we embrace, and our shoulders cradle the other as we stand side by side at the same height. From our feet to our knees, our hips to our ribcages, our collarbones to our same jutting chin. We share a head full of blonde-brown hair. Our eyes and the rings of lime green in shades of blue. Our skin and complexion, our smiles and frowns, and our laughs and shouts are the same, but I have Father's feet, his wider shoulders, and his longer hands. In the eyes of everyone who knows her, they see us and know we are hers. It’s a comforting ache, a too-tight hug constricting the heart pounding behind the cage of ribs.
We are genetic mirrors, the faces of those our ancestors loved and lived for immortalised in flesh and bone. Hers is the flesh we cleaved ourselves from. We are the fistful of cells she nurtured within her, a greedy little thing, she grumbled, who loved us in the gore.
When us women are at home, after school or a day at work, the hearth is lit and the house is warm. Dinner bubbles and boils, the candles cast flickering gasps of flame across the wall, and the cats are curled up by the spitting fire. Our bellies are filled, our tea is brewed, and we are safe and happy.
When the men are home, and the women are away, the house is a dark star. Cold and dead, the lamps remain dark and the shadows descend. Our brother and father congregate separately in their rooms at opposite ends. This is a house to them, not a home. A space that necessitates sleeping, bathing, exercising, and eating for themselves. There is no us, but them.
When our mother was nine, she fell and slammed her face on the concrete outside her home in Percy Street. She used to joke that she had a free nose job because she shattered the delicate bone and cartilage. The doctors were forced to reshape it like moulding a clay doll. In childhood photos, yellowed with age, she sat beside our uncle, freckled, with pale blonde hair now greying, and a small nose scrunched up with a cheeky smile. When we were nine and scared from night terrors into her bed she would tap us on the bridge of our brow and say with soft eyes in the dark;
“You have my nose.”
We wonder if we will age as she has when we are full-grown women, wives and mothers to greedy babies of our own. Will they have our noses and smiles? We wonder if whatever is lost to age is found again in our children, amalgamations of ourselves and those we love like puzzle pieces scattered across the table, the chairs, the floors, and found again dusty behind the sofa to be made into something new and strange.
We hope when we are old we will look in the mirror on a Sunday morning and the sun is shining, the children are asleep, and see her face as ours.
The home we lived in all our lives is photographed on Google Maps. The address we know off by heart is typed in, and we wait. There, it says, ‘Image captured 2015’. The two cars in the driveway are old and gone now, rotting in some stranger's street. A ball lost years ago is a bright red resting near the magnolia tree. The brick letterbox is painted white, not blue. The gate is a soggy wood instead of black iron and the trees are so small, as short as we were then.
It’s dusk and our mother’s bedroom light illuminates the dried-up garden before we planted the rosemary and thyme. We imagine her in there, stomping on the wood floors, clattering in her tiny bathroom still painted pink. It has old ‘70s tiling and the long mirror is aged with rust around the rims. Scratches in the wall reveal the lilac paint beneath from when we were first born and the house was new.
The cold tile used to be wooden floorboards that creaked and groaned, replaced when we were 13 and had run the bath during cartoon hour and promptly forgotten. The water had overflowed and spilled in waves down the hall, soaking everything through that winter. We couldn’t take a step without the boards shifting in place and protesting at every movement.
We still remember those glimpses of that old life, that young body, and it is almost as if we are still there, and we are 13 again.
The old dog is alive and young. Our father is reading the paper on the white leather lounge and our brother is small with funny ears and long, gangly legs. Our mother flutters through the door in her heels and with hands full, a yell in her throat at the mess.
And we are together.