Lights On, Echo Park

The mirror is still there. I keep expecting to have turned it back.

Three weeks ago I carried it out of the bathroom on a Thursday night, set it against the baseboard across from the bed, angled it up. I don't know what I thought I was doing. I told myself it was an experiment. I left the overhead light on — the one I've always switched off, the one that makes everything visible — and I lay down and I looked at myself looking, and then I turned the light off and did what I usually do in the dark. So it didn't count. Not really.

Tonight I left the light on.

Los Angeles in August holds its heat past midnight. The bungalow doesn't have central air, just the ceiling fan turning slow overhead, and the air that moves through it is warm and smells faintly of the jasmine on the back fence. I'm lying on top of the sheets because the sheets are too much. I'm not wearing anything because nothing is too much. This is already different from the dark. In the dark I'm a feeling. In the light I'm a body, which turns out to be more complicated and more interesting than I expected.

I've been lying here for ten minutes without doing anything. That's new too.

What I'm doing is looking. The mirror catches the overhead light and throws it back softer — something about the angle, the slight warp in the old glass. I can see the line of my collarbone. The way my stomach rises and falls. My own face, which is the strange part, which is the part I keep almost looking away from. Twenty-nine years old and I didn't know my face made that expression. Anticipation, maybe. Or something that hasn't got a name yet.

The bullet vibrator is on the sheet beside my right hip. I put it there when I lay down. I haven't touched it yet.

My left hand is flat against my sternum. I can feel my own pulse there — quicker than resting, steadier than I'd have guessed. The ceiling fan turns. The jasmine comes and goes. In the mirror, the woman on the bed has not moved, but something in her face has shifted, and I watch it shift, and I think: so that's what wanting looks like on me.

I reach for the bullet with my right hand. My fingers close around it — smooth, lighter than it looks, still off.

In the mirror, I watch my own hand move.

I make myself keep watching.

The exhale that comes out of me is longer than I meant it to be, slow and audible in the quiet room, like something I'd been holding without knowing I was holding it.

The mirror doesn't look away.

Neither do I.