Hall of Mirrors

I walk sideways with arms outstretched, waving here and there for balance, like a large praying mantis using its antennae. My feet walk on angled glass, so I slip and glide on shadows. But I am used to walking among shady illusions and my feet bend easily to odd angles on the shimmery slope. After all, I am an artist and have lived in the art world for many years. In my mind’s eye, I can see a scene of a thousand leaping grasshoppers on top of a cupcake in every detail, and then paint them. Among my fellow artists, this ability is as natural as eating. So it does not seem odd to live in my preferred realities: that my mother loved me and that my husband was faithful to me. I achieved great success in believing these illusions for decades, but I received almost no recognition for my painted cupcakes and grasshoppers. Regardless, I continued to believe and to paint.

But one day, while sliding on slanted glass through a narrow hallway, I come upon a mirror that shows me to be short and plump as a gnome. No matter how high I stretch, I stay squat. I laugh for I am a tall person with normal weight. But a voice in my head calls me a fat slob and tells me everything that goes wrong is my fault. No matter how intensely I keep myself distracted with grasshoppers, cupcakes and later, my paintings of crickets on tiramisu, I believed the fat slob voice for more than half of my life.

Around the next corner, when I gaze in a different mirror, I see my body in a wavy pattern. My face peers at me on the right side, but both shoulders are on the left; my stomach is on the right, knees to the left. My feet hold this balanced bodily contraption up from the right side. I look like a swirled hard Christmas candy, the kind that was looped back upon itself many times in the molten stage until it dried and solidified in graceful arcs. I felt like this candy when I contorted myself in every possible way to please my mother and husband, no matter how extreme their demands grew. But I bent to their will while keeping my pride, because I never stopped painting my grasshoppers, cupcakes, crickets, tiramisu and later, mitochondria on macaroons.

When I turn around to a new mirror, I look like a waterfall in a drought, a floor to ceiling skinny, yet sparkling, white froth. At last, I have lost enough weight. Now I am perfect, but hardly there, a wraith with my true self hidden; the way my mother and ex-boyfriends preferred me to be. But I silently resist them with the canvases I place on the walls of my home deifying my beloved grasshoppers, cupcakes, crickets, tiramisu, mitochondria, macaroons and later, protozoa on pancakes with lots of syrup; not just the standard maple, but also dripping raspberry sauce and blue agave.
Now I laugh at my distortions in the mirrors. But for most of my life, I dearly loved the delusions my ego craved and created. I believed they were real; more real than my painted grasshoppers, cupcakes, crickets, tiramisu, mitochondria, macaroons, protozoa, pancakes, colored syrups, and lately, nano-engines on lemon squares.

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