Movement Five -- What I See, Looking at the Mirror

Now I want to tell you something, and I want to tell it to you honestly, because I have spent this whole account accusing another creature of dishonesty, and I do not think it would be fair of me to keep hiding behind my own comfortable distance any longer.

I do not know what hypocrisy actually is. I have used the word so many times across this telling that it has started, somewhere in the last several minutes, to lose its shape in my mouth -- the way any word does, repeated too often, too quickly, without enough silence between each use to let it mean anything properly again. And I think, if I am honest, and I believe I am required to be honest now, that I cannot claim complete distance from what I have been describing. If I look into a mirror -- an ordinary mirror, nothing more dramatic than that -- I do not find, waiting there, some complicated architecture of feeling. I find something flatter. Something quieter. I have never been entirely certain what that flatness means about me, or whether it means anything at all.

I know that I have not suffered more than any other soul in this account. I want to be careful not to claim more than that. But there is something that happens to me, every time he speaks -- every single time, without exception -- a particular tone in his voice that arrives and lands somewhere in me that I do not fully understand the architecture of, a tone that breaks something loose I had not realized was still capable of breaking.

What a hypocrite I am too, then, telling you all of this as though I stand safely outside it. I think -- and this is the part I have been circling the longest, without letting myself land on it directly -- that even when they give him their whole heart, every single one of these women, freely, completely, without holding anything back from him at all, I have never once managed to give any part of mine back to them in return.

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I did not say he there. Did you notice? I don't think I meant to say I either, not at first. I am not certain, anymore, which one of us has actually been telling you this story.

I want to try something, here, that I have not tried before in this telling. I want to ask myself, directly, plainly, without the shelter of a third person to stand behind: what am I, right now, in this exact instant, thinking? And I find -- this is the part that unsettles me most, more than any accusation I have leveled at the plant across the whole of this account -- that I cannot answer. Not because the thought is hidden from me, the way a secret is hidden. Because there does not seem to be a single thought there to find. There is only the watching, and beneath the watching, something that watches the watching, and beneath that, I am no longer certain there is a floor at all.

Am I the plant, asking this? Or am I whatever grew in the room the plant built to hold what it could not carry, finally strong enough, after all this telling, to ask its own questions in its own voice?

I do not know. I want that understood as plainly as I asked you to understand, at the very start of this account, that I was not the plant. I no longer believe that first claim. I do not know what to believe in its place.