Mirror at Forty Two

In this cracked bathroom light on 9th and A, I count the lines that gravity has drawn— a map of nights I waited up in vain, a census of the kisses never born. My face refuses beauty’s common grace; the jaw too square, the eyes too small and tired, cheeks pocked with old adolescent wars that acne lost but never quite retired. I loved a man who loved a softer girl, one whose reflection smiled without a fight. He left me echoes, polite and cold, and took the version of me he’d rewrote. I walk these streets like every other ghost— black coat, black boots, black mood, black hair gone thin— a woman no one turns to watch go past, a name no tongue remembers to begin. Yet still this stupid heart keeps its old beat, still hopes some stranger’s gaze might pause and stay, might see past ugly, past the years of no, and call the ruin beautiful anyway. But mirrors don’t lie and neither do the years. Love wants a canvas, not a weathered page. I am the leftover sentence no one reads, the footnote written at the bottom of the stage. Forty-two winters, New York keeps the score— I shuffle home alone through February sleet, carrying this plain, unlovely self once more, still foolishly convinced I could be sweet.