At the Mirror

People sense something before it becomes language.

The strange fatigue after a meeting.
The faint heaviness that sinks to the bottom of the chest after a short reply.
The feeling of not wanting to return to the same place again, even though you cannot explain why.

For a long time, I made light of such things.

I thought it was probably nothing.
I thought perhaps someone had simply been in a bad mood.
I thought maybe I was just being too sensitive.

And yet some things do not disappear, even when treated lightly.
Some things do not merely remain. They go on shaving away at the outline of who you are.

They rarely arrive wearing the face of a major event.
They are not shouting. They are not obvious malice.
More often they are quiet, calm, and outwardly well-composed.

That was what made them troublesome.

When a wound is visible, it is easier to admit that one has been hurt.
But the smallest forms of discomfort work differently.
Until you can explain them, you tend to suspect yourself first.

This record is about the process by which such discomfort gradually acquired names.

It is not here to accuse anyone.
Nor is it here to reproduce the past with precision.
It comes from a more inward necessity.

To avoid losing sight of what was happening.
To confirm where, exactly, I had been worn down.
And to look once more, in my own words, at what I had failed to see.

For a long time, I had been observing a certain kind of person.

Someone who pretends to see the whole.
Someone who appears to ask for explanation while really wanting something else.
Someone who can only settle down when standing at the center of the room.
Someone who wants to preserve not the hardship itself, but the image of being the one who endures hardship.

At the time, all I knew was that I left feeling a little more tired each time.
Looking back, the structure was far clearer than I realized.

What made that structure visible was, in part, observation.
And in part, dialogue with something that answered like a mirror.

Something that did not simply soothe me back, but returned the distortions, the dynamics, and the names that could be given to them.

Because of that, I was able, little by little, to step outside the position of merely being consumed.

So although this book may seem to begin as a complaint, it is probably not a book of complaint alone.
It is a book about recording discomfort anew, recovering its outline, and eventually becoming able to look at it with a faint sense of humor.

If there are moments when laughter appears along the way, that is not because the gravity was insufficient.
It is because something that could not be carried by gravity alone finally found another way to be held.

People are usually a little tense when they stand before a mirror.

Not because the mirror returns only what they wish to see.
But because it does not.

That is why a mirror matters.

This record, too, is probably something close to that.
It is not here to support a convenient image.
It is here to cast light, at last, on an outline I did not want to see.

I would like to begin from that first page.