Not looking in a mirror is reassuring. One can maintain beauty much easier inside their own mind if there is no external negative input. That also begs for staying locked up in the house.
There can be tracks in the mind — ruts and gutters, potholes and corrosion — but the mind is easier to trick if a decision has been committed to to believe there is beauty and a mirror might disturb that kind of committed persuasion. So, a mirror is best avoided — at least until or if any ruts, gutters, potholes and/or corrosion get mended or a new road is provided.
“Mirror mirror. I have decided that I am beautiful. What say you — you’d better say it’s true or I will break you into a million pieces. So there. Take that. So, now what say you?”
The mirror glared back a distasteful answer and she decided to wait to crack it — give it time to think of a better answer. Maybe if she asked it again enough time later, it would see her in a more favorable way. In the mean time, Mirror was skirted. “You’re not going to get any company from me,” she said to herself, knowing Mirror couldn’t hear and wouldn’t care if it could — not that it had anyone else to talk to — after all, she was locked up in the house alone so there couldn’t be any negative input.
That’s not really true.
She had just come back from getting groceries, (after several earlier conversations in her mind while skirting Mirror), and she had showered her body and washed her hair before going. Because her hair was so kinky and frizzy after washing if it wasn’t blown dry and curled with the curling iron, (and it was far too late in the day to do all that), she put on a bandanna and some pink cheeks and pink lips and brushed on some eyebrows to replace the one that had long ago gone missing. She gave Mirror a chance to glance her and Mirror said it was enough and that she might be favorably glared at by the people who passed her in the grocery store if she would just smile politely and assume that they were only thinking good thoughts as they probably wouldn’t look at her much anyway.
She had lined up at the garden register where the handsome man she likes who has a girlfriend but she still enjoys him is and there was a fancy-made-up lady just before her chatting away and he was being rather friendly but not as friendly or in the same way as he usually is to her. Once that lady was finished and gone away his “HI! How are you!!?” made her day and she couldn’t wait to get back to tell Mirror that Mirror had been right and the pink cheeks and lips and penciled eyebrows had been enough.
But once she got back, she wasn’t as interested any more in what Mirror had to say. She had other things to do and that is just as important to how beautiful someone can feel, (or their mind can think), they are as what a mirror has to say — because, if they’re busy doing things they love, beauty leeks out into the thing being done and then the thing that’s been done can be stared at instead of at a mirror.
Getting things done that are liked or even loved in their doing seems to have a way of mending gutters, ruts and potholes — and far better than waiting on any better favor from a mirror.
Happy conversation from a handsome grocery clerk, doesn’t hurt a bit in mending beauty either.
Writing Spool 