Anne Germanacos

Mirrors

Personal Aesthetic statement:

Sometimes life seems so potent that you can digest it only in sentences. To attempt paragraphs seems false and likely to omit what's most important. At the same time, one can't dwell in such intensity forever. Perhaps all mirrors have their uses.

In our family, we play it cool, especially when emotion threatens to fly out of control. Yesterday, I gave her dog not just a pat but a full-body hug—it was the first time I'd seen my sister in over three months.

Today, I work with thick sticky tape to erase the traces.

*

The endodontist's cotton ball, sprayed with freezing agent and touched to a tooth, caused a heightened awareness of nerves: pain.

*

My brain, in its cool linearity, is stymied by my mother's—more versatile by far, and capable of going from A to Z in a single leap. How will we bend her to our logic? Being bent to hers is hardly an option.

Back in fighting form, this woman who eats an apple a day, but a small one, and nothing else.

*

One wonders at the weight of a life; one wonders what to do with it.

With a death, memory and purpose are bundled, conflated, if sometimes confused.

*

My older son almost talked me into changing the color of my hair. But I came back to my senses. I have such lively hair!

*

Our friend's job in the army is selling sandwiches in the canteen! We were so worried he'd have to clean toilets or continue guarding tanks from dusk 'til dawn. But no. He sells a sandwich now and again, turns on the TV, watches sports on cable. If there's nothing on, he plays a game or two of chess.

*

In between his sweet reasonableness, my younger son keeps telling me "shut the fuck up."

*

The things they tell you when trying to sell products to enhance the health of your skin. (Smoothing on eye gel: Can you feel the skin tightening?)

*

I have a new hard tooth in my head. Fake, but it's anchored to my jaw and body by a shaved down version of the real one, the original. So it's a composite—part mine, part not. But mine by virtue of being here with me, in my mouth, constantly, sluiced by a river of saliva.

*

The only novel I'd ever write would be in a foreign language—Hebrew, maybe, or Persian, or possibly a language I don't yet know a word of.

*

She says he can only say "I love you." If that's not the absolute truth, it's still the fundamental truth.

*

More actors on the stage of our life: fly, mosquito, gnat.

*

Are people angry with the dead person because there's no hope of communicating with him anymore? Or, simply because isolation breeds paranoia?

*

With a sibling, the ease and comfort of being together invites identification—or comes from it. Such identification breaches boundaries—good fences make good neighbors.

I could call that story "Bile."

*

How is it that I've become so used to repeated conversations that I'm no longer bothered by them? Is this patience, skill, or tactic? Resilience, flexibility, or madness? Love, fear, or both?

*

Low-lying fog and high clouds with spaces between showing blue sky.

To the far west, by the ocean, an etched pearl line.

*

As much as possible, you try to make yours seem like a real life.

*

I've developed what feels like infinite patience. It can be scary. Who draws the line between patience and passivity? And where? Passivity feels small and blind; this feels immense.

*

I've taken very few pictures lately. One from my window, including the window itself. (Perhaps that's the point.)

*

That could be the moral of the story: how we all try for lives and hers is as much of one as anyone else's, and how sometimes hers being one gives me hope for my own and other times it makes me heartbroken with the way ours diverge.

*

Snow has fallen in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad for the first time in living memory.

*

We ate salty food last night—I can see it beneath my eyes this morning.

We've been up since dark, the best time of day.

*

My mother is still so much herself and worthy of our pity and infinite forgiveness and love. Sometimes she meanders into crazy territory; we have to escort her back to the closer shore.

*

My family asphyxiates me; not one of them has anything he'd rather do.

*

Found in my drawer, written a while ago: Grief: a process of disassembly. The bereaved must let go of the selves they were, as well as the loved ones lost.

*

There is nothing I want except nothing.

*

A mother is someone you love until you hate her. I'm sure it goes the other way as well.

*

It takes confidence, desperation, and bravado to go where one needs to go in order to find history.

Once there, you realize that it provides an eternal object of longing: it won't ever run out.

History runs back in time until there's nothing recorded—and then it simply runs back into an abyss you may color yourself, should imagination rise to the occasion.

I can't understand a young person's interest in history; in order to look at it, you have to face the wrong way.

*

It seems hugely audacious to allow imagination to purport to knowledge.

*

I prefer my maps, she said, and went back to her book; he boarded another plane.

*

My heart makes noise; I let it.

*

This day is perfect: a slight warm breeze and unusual clarity. Air swirls. The sun extends itself, touches all corners.

*

A friend told me about a man she knows who eats through a tube in his side. He stayed with her for seventeen days and she never got tired of him or the fact that he poured full cream into a tube and once, after eating beef bourguignon, threw up. This man spent hundreds of dollars every week on food for her family. One can understand, or think one understands the impulse to taste through the mouths of others.

*

Why is one's experience of the DMV always so painful?

*

We went to see him and there was enthusiasm mixed with split-seconds of dismay as he tried to read our faces, our words, or something so deep inside and unknown that even we had no inkling of its shade, hue, or timbre.

*

Today has been very pleasurable, indeed.

*

The plum tree outside my window is almost leafless. Just a few near the top, like those bald men with a long straggly hair or two.

*

When the day turned from rain to light and sun, my younger son and I were disappointed. Does it always have to be sunny, we moaned.

*

There are thoughts, but we're a little pressed for time.

*

What is one's understanding of an other? We're so sure of our opinions, our insipid intuitions, our moral acumen. Oh dear.

*

Near the end of the summer, we killed the grass. It had been almost dead for so long that the thought came as a revelation and before we knew it we were pouring Roundup, like cowboys or farmers, watching what was left of the green turn yellow before our eyes.

The next morning, the grass looked dead but wilder, more like a patch of prairie. My son and I agreed that we liked it better that way, and so we've left it, dead but wilder looking, having learnt a new combination.

*

There are good mirrors and bad, but is it the good mirror that reflects you back at yourself as you are, or as you are not?

We're all tied up in our estimation of mirrors.

Anne Germanacos' work has appeared in over sixty literary reviews and anthologies. In 2010, a collection of her short stories will be published by BOA Editions. She lives in San Francisco and on the island of Crete.

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