When he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror it was four in the morning and outside the frosty air was smearing the window panes with tiny liquid pearls. There in the mirror he saw reflected, in wordless presence, the sadness.
It was the same sadness that had been with him through all the years. But he had always taken pains not to see it, shifting his focus instead through one distraction after another. Mostly he just worked hard, long hours. Still the sadness was there - obvious in the silent, unfocused moments when the mind wavers. Despite the rumbling speed of his life, when distractions failed, he became aware of it as though gazing out the passenger window and noticing a vast, barren landscape.
That night he carried the sadness home in the cold under the misty streetlamps. The distraction that was the thunderous music of the nightclub had faded, leaving his mind and body exhausted. In the cacophony of that sound circus, he had twirled himself into profound distraction, one performer lost among the clowns and freaks reflected in the club's mirrors under the dizzying light.
Swirling in the club's madness there had been some fleeting words sung, something about sex and music. Visions of male faces with wanton stares - vacant windows - and liquid smiles, rushed past in the torrent of beating sound. And then the sound swirled into the drain of silence and the crowd poured out and someone vomited in a corner; he pressed his way out and walked quietly home.
There was no point to avoidance. Even if he should traverse that wide, barren landscape in an attempt to elude capture, the sadness always pursued without effort. How could he outrun the moon hanging in the night sky? He looked deep into the mirror and said, yes, I am here, to the sadness, and we will be together for some time yet.
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