Settle For Reflection

By Tegan Elliott

She had never been a fan of mirrors. When she was younger, she avoided them, thinking her smile too awkward for her face, her hair always too long or not long enough, and her skin too clammy and marred by stretch marks or childhood scars to leave uncovered. She never thought she would look like herself. At some point, she had gotten used to avoiding herself in reflections. Staring at the sink while she brushed her teeth, doing her hair up without looking, and freehanding her makeup. She spent her life without looking in mirrors. She was grown now, maybe a decade or two from when she started avoiding mirrors, and now she only knew what she looked like from her friends’ social media, and even then her image was often in the background and unclear. She had only wanted to look at her new tattoo. Her first two tattoos were around her wrists, in easy view at all times. The third was on the back of her shoulder. Now that it was healed, she had peeled off the gauze and was perched awkwardly on the edge of her bathroom sink, one foot wedged under the basin, the other propped on the toilet, gripping the edge of the sink so hard her knuckles had gone white. She had only looked away from the tattoo for a moment, to make sure she was not about to fall. But she had caught the eye of her reflection, and for the first time in so many years, she saw herself. Her smile was too wide, and her teeth looked blunted where they should be sharp and sharpened where they should not be. The cuts in her eyebrow, done on a dare, were lopsided and too close. There was an ugly little scar on the side of her chin. Her posture was horrible, her torso half folded in on itself, body rolls stacked along the slouched plane of her stomach. She had not gotten much taller over the years, but she had gotten bigger. Her arms were wide, her biceps covered in stretch marks, wide bands of jagged lightning scored into her skin. Her hair was too short where the side buzzed close to her head, too long everywhere else where it fell into her face. She looked nothing like what she remembered. Nothing like the image she had crafted in her mind with bits and pieces over the years. She looked beautiful. She looked happy. Comfortable in a skin she made her own, somewhere along the line. She stopped avoiding mirrors.