I sit around the dining room table and watch the assortment of distorted mirrors sitting around me. With interest, I examine the smattering of features we share which I never took the trouble to notice before. My father and his sister share the same downward-facing crescent-shaped eyes. The corners of his mouth however, you can see if you look closely, are turned upward whereas gravity has its pull on hers. One has chosen to make lemonade whereas the other has chosen not to forget sour times: free will has played its part, it seems.
Seated opposite my mother, she became the subject of my intrigued gaze. As she leant forward, I watched the skin across her collarbone fold into hundreds of microscopic creases I had never noticed before. Those lines etched the gap between her and I. I began to wonder where I would be in my life when my body would begin to betray the age and the weight of the world it had carried which already burdened my mind.
I like to believe that I am original in my dreams and innermost desires. However, at the end of the day, my aspirations, despairingly complicated as they may seem, are inherently basic: someone who will see and feel the wrinkles across my skin and tell me I am beautiful and that I am loved. Perhaps that is a blessing that is worth more than any amount of trips around the world can ever amount to. But as I stand still where the path begins, the most intricate and complex of trips seems easier to plan than the one and only journey we must leave up to fate.
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