red light and mirrors

Once, a friend told me that if you looked into a mirror in a dimly lit room you could see your face morph into different faces. I tried this once in his bathroom that had a red heat lamp. You stare into your own eyes and relax them as if you're trying to view those 3-D posters looking for the hidden picture amongst the colored squares.

I hung in long enough to see 4 faces beyond my current one emerge. It's a creepy thing watching your face morph in a mirror into people that seem familiar to you. An old woman, a young lady, a young girl. Coincidentally, been having interesting maillist conversations about the crone and how the women escorting the bride down the aisle are meant to be the maid, the matron, and the crone. How these are both stages and roles in a woman's life.

But it's the young girl who has followed me for more than a year now. My fear at the time would have judged her as evil with eyes that carried an intent too fierce for a girl her age and a smile that came from a hidden knowledge. Since then however, she is not so frightening.

There has been a reoccurring vision in my mind of this young girl. She is sitting in a clearing in the forest, a black hood covering her head and masking most of her face from the full moon light. Only her eyes sparkle from the shadow cast. She both knows and doesn't know why she is there. She knows she has always been different. There are other children sitting in this circle along with a few other women, also cloaked.

In the center is a old woman who seems thin of skin and bones. She dances with bells on her ankles, knees bent as if sitting, stepping in small yet thunderous steps as the find dust billows into smoky clouds. She is chanting, I think, or perhaps singing along with a music only she can hear.

I'm not sure what else happens. I know the young girl is there for some kind of apprenticeship. She was chosen because she knows of things that she should not know of. She will later be seen as both myth and reality.

Later, I believe it is still her, but many years later, a young woman, sweeping the floors of a Spanish aristocrat, a military officer maybe. She sings songs while washing clothes at the river, sending messages through her melodies. I think it's the 1800s.

She is somehow tied to a gay man sitting at a touristy men's bar in Waikiki talking to the girlfriends of the male strippers. I don't know much about him, except that he is lonely and going to the bar helps him think, the solitude amongst strangers. There is at least one more story that is some how linked, but I don't know what it is.

And everywhere along the line, there is magic, that is both dark and light, joyous and frightening, that they are able to touch.