Poetry

My new apartment bathroom lights are so bright they remind me of floodlights

You know what I mean. Those god-awful-blaringly-white florescent lights.

The worst things to wake up to and probably the worst lights ever invented.

You can see every pour, wrinkle, and vein under those lights

They are harsh and unflinching.

There is no hiding under those bright floodlights

I’ve begun to dread bathroom lighting, especially after a night of drinking and well… other activities. I scrutinize myself under them, focusing on everything but the set of blurry lost eyes in front of me. Maybe I do it on purpose—looking at myself as a mass of imperfections instead of as a human being. Maybe I prefer to live in ignorance. Because if I scrutinized my whole self the way I scrutinize my face, I wouldn’t like the woman I’m staring at. It’s better to be mildly annoyed at smudged mascara and clogged pours than it is to reflect on the person in the mirror and the choices she’s making. Choices that are completely out of character. Choices I will not be proud of in the morning. My life is a mess, a hurricane of recklessness and loneliness. To acknowledge the chaos would mean looking down and seeing that I’ve been in slowly rising water for a long time. It’s lukewarm now—not too much of a shock to the system anymore so it’s easier to carry on. But it’s there nonetheless, like a fly in the house on a summer day. You can’t always see it but it will appear again. Eventually I will have to stop and acknowledge the rising water and deal with it because

There is no hiding under those bright floodlights.