On Not Being Reflected
This morning, when I went to the mirror, the mirror was facing the other way.
Or rather, the mirror was where it had always been, hanging on its nail, but the person inside it had turned around. He was standing with his back to me, examining, it seemed, whatever lay on his side of the glass. I cleared my throat. He did not turn. I tilted my head to the right, hoping to catch his profile, and he tilted his head to the right also, which only showed me more of the back of his head. I tried the left. The same. He was perfectly polite, perfectly attentive, willing to mirror everything I did, except the one thing I had asked of him.
I took him down from the wall to speak with him more privately. I turned him over. I turned him back. He continued his small, courteous refusal. I understood then that he was not being difficult, exactly. He simply belonged to a different arrangement than the one I had assumed. In his world, perhaps, it was I who stood with my back turned, and he who waited, patiently, for me to show him my face.
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This struck me as reasonable. It also struck me that the book on my desk, when I held it up to him, appeared reversed in exactly the way books are meant to appear in mirrors, so the mirror was performing its duties correctly. The fault, if one wished to call it that, lay in some small misalignment between his city and mine. We had been placed back to back and asked to converse.
I considered the situation. I had perhaps risen from bed in the wrong direction, and the day, having begun this way, would continue this way, and there was nothing to be done about it except to walk through it with good manners. One does not argue with a mirror. One adjusts.
And there is, after all, a small gift in the arrangement.
I have lived all my life without ever seeing the back of my own neck, and today, without effort, I can study it as long as I like.
This piece was originally written in Turkish between 2004 and 2009. The English version was rendered with Claude (Anthropic), working from the original text to preserve its tone and rhythm rather than to translate it literally.
