I looked into the mirror, my stormy eyes meeting my reflection, my upswept wild, strawberry-blonde hair turning me into a human dandelion, a few freckles sprinkled over my mostly clear complexion. My appearance didn’t matter. I suddenly understood Sylvia Plath’s poem more than I’d ever understood it. No one interprets a poem the same way. That’s the beauty of poetry, but this assignment wasn’t about a poem. It wasn’t even about the mirror. It was about how we viewed ourselves, and how that view can change with time.
Picking up my pencil, I started to write, my heart bleeding down my arms and into my fingers, the words that formed becoming a sprawling mess of gray lead blood. I wrote and I wrote until there was nothing left in me, nothing except a clean slate ready to be re-written on.
The next day, when last period English class came to an end and Mrs. Callahan called for the assignments, I stood with everyone else, my hand going to Heathcliff’s arm. He’d stood next to me, and he froze.
In the front of the room, students were placing the papers on Mrs. Callahan’s desk and leaving, but I held Heathcliff back, my gaze finding his shoes.
“I’ve got this,” I told him. My words broke the silence we’d once again come to depend on.
“What do you mean?” Heathcliff asked.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s time for you to trust me. Just go. I’ve got this.” There were two copies of the paper I’d written the night before, my fingers still sore from writing it once and then re-writing it, and I handed the extra one to him. “Take this and go.”
He accepted the paper, and I walked away, approaching Mrs. Callahan’s desk without tripping despite the sudden trembling in my body knowing Heathcliff watched.
The rest of the students were gone, and the teacher looked up at me, an expectant smile on her face. She started to speak, but I held out the assignment in my hand, the paper shaking visibly.
“I know this wasn’t a group project, but Max Vincent and I worked on it together,” I said, clearing my throat. “Well, I did the actual writing, but we’ve worked most of the past semester working on bits and pieces of it.”
Mrs. Callahan took the paper, her gaze going over my shoulder before glancing down at the assignment. The title on the first page caught her off guard, and she threw me a look. “I admit I’m intrigued,” she said. Throwing one final glance over my shoulder, she added, “I’ll take it. Whatever grade you get, Max will get, too.”
Nodding, I left, passing a stunned Heathcliff where he stood just inside the classroom door. He was staring down at the paper, his eyes moving over the words. I didn’t stay to find out what he thought. I knew what he and Mrs. Callahan were reading, and my lips curled into a smile as I pushed through the door at the end of the hall, my feet bursting out into a sunny day. A new beginning.
Inside, Heathcliff and Mrs. Callahan were reading this:
Clare Macy
Mrs. Callahan
Date not important
Hawthorne and Heathcliff
Forget poetry for a moment and look at life. Looking into a mirror isn’t really about seeing a reflection, it’s about seeing change. It’s about the passing of time, and time doesn’t need a mirror. It just happens, which means we must carry a figurative mirror with us and learn to look at ourselves without needing a looking glass.
This year, I changed.
This year, I met a shoe. It wasn’t a remarkable shoe. It was worn, the black trim that once lined the white turned gray. The white part of the sneaker had turned, too, stained by dirt and time, but it was a clean shoe. It was well kept, and I knew by looking at it that it had also been repaired numerous times.
That shoe belonged to a boy, a young man whose feet became a lifeline for me in a world of angry silence. My shoe, equally old and worn but not as well kept, rested next to his. It belonged to a girl, a young woman full of bitterness and distrust.
Shoes are kind of like mirrors. They lie more than a mirror does. They carry people to places they shouldn’t go, and because they can’t speak, they can’t say where they’ve been. Yet they also take people to places they should have gone, making them try things they’ve always avoided.
The boy belonged to a shoe that always tried. The girl belonged to a shoe that hid. He belonged to a shoe that was well put together. She belonged to one that didn’t care.
His shoe changed hers.
It seems funny that I’m writing about shoes, but not so funny I guess since we’re talking about poetry. Plath saw something in her mirror that made personifying the looking glass important.
In these shoes, I saw the same thing. I saw a journey. It was an amazing journey, a story of love, trust, and loss. This boy and his shoe changed the girl and her shoe. He taught her that it was okay to fall. He taught her it was okay to trust.
While she was falling, she learned something. She learned that she’d been hiding so much behind her own pain, her own childhood abandonment issues, that she’d missed her life. She’d closed herself off from the people she loved, the ones who’d loved her enough to stay behind when everyone else left. She learned about her uncle.