I am you and you are me

I realized this morning that I have this unsatisfiable need to see myself in new mirrors often enough that it makes me feel uncomfortable about myself. The new mirrors at new places that I go to, the mirrors I cannot lie to. I am getting older, my body is changing and I am not the pro tennis player anymore. Now I am an artist. My body is getting soft, as maybe I am too, and though I look somewhat thirty, I can feel the forty in my bones, especially upon waking. I can feel the effects of the dreadful medicine I have been taking for the last six years, but above and beyond anything I can feel my laziness which piled up on my superbly designed body. My hair is turning gray, which I love, my skin is getting a bit dull, which I highly dislike, and at certain angles in these new mirrors I don’t really like myself. But did I ever? 

Life is happening all around me, as I sit on a bench and with great anticipation wait for the cafe in front of the hotel to open, because I am addicted again… to coffee. A young Georgian woman wearing jeans, a light brown tank top and high black hills is stirring up the calm of the morning energy. She walks to the street and back to the cafe with a fuss and a fasson of a busy woman. I watch her coming and going in front of me and I examine her, examine - not judge, and at this very moment I finally know and am in peace with the idea that I will never be like her, although at some point in my life I tried and for some unjustified reason wanted to be “her” and not myself. I am nothing like her, wearing my famously black plane “uniform” which I wear in an attempt to disguise my strong presence and casually wearing my recently acquired black designer crocs, to which I am now shamelessly very attached to. Although I have not become “her” and remained myself, “the myself” with crocs or without, is yet needed to be found and established, at 40. 

There is a grandmother with her grandchild on the bench to my right, feeding a banana to the child. The child munching mindlessly on the banana forced into her mouth keeps looking at me with wide blue eyes curiously examining every inch of me and my every move. I suddenly feel very responsible under her gaze and for her subconscious recollection of me in the future, so I smile at her, then look back down at my pen and paper and keep my back straight and my movements graceful. 

The street to my left is steadily getting busier and noisier. I am calm in my very core, and the slight wind is playing with my hair which makes me feel beautiful. I wonder if God intended it like that, to make soft wind, to play with women’s hair to make us feel beautiful. 

I am sitting next to a building, the same building I set by years ago after my car got towed from a wrong parking spot when I stopped for coffee in the heart of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. This was the trip during which I wore my white linen dress and every single police officer on the highway pulled me over while I drove from Yerevan to Dilijan, then to Tbilisi and off to Gudauri and ended up at a beautiful hotel on top of the village called Kazbeki. “I will never return to Georgia again” were my last thoughts on my way back home, sitting exactly here on this bench, in despair, feeling uncomfortable and extremely lonely and a bit angry at myself for coming, against all odds and mysterious signs that I shouldn’t have. 

Lately I have started to notice that I rarely feel lonely anymore, if ever. After a lifetime of feeling lonely it was alarming to suddenly notice that the feeling of loneliness is gone. The absence of a feeling that although slightly frightens me, is also courageous and a triumph. I learned to accept life, not life as it is, or my life as I have built it to be, but life in whole. Life as the existence that is around me that completely includes me and omittes me from it at the same time, the life that I am part of and the life that I am not part of at all. This life - I am at peace with it.

I was supposed to give an interview today, which was then going to turn into a little beautiful movie about me. And I think it was high time I did something like that because the world is forgetting about me while I am finding acceptance hiding in my shell and black plain uniforms. But still I decided to pause and try to listen to the middle of my chest today, and although being responsible has always been “my thing”, today I decided to hear what life inside my chest wanted from me. So I canceled the interview. I fled to Georgia with the excuse that I have a rash on my face, the excuse that tied me to my past insecure self and the irrational decision that drove me towards the new me which I need to still build more confidently. I wish I was already the person who would just call and say “I don’t want to do the interview today, let’s reschedule” and not come up with an excuse of an imaginary rash or feel guilty. 

The idea of driving through our Armenian mountains in full blossom and ending up at a place where there are new mirrors and new smells and new tastes and new views was too appealing to me today. I wanted to leave so that I would want to return again. I wanted to miss everything that I love so that I can come back to it, to them. I wanted to write in a place where I have no responsibilities, where I just can exist and feel it fully. So I canceled the interview and left with a friend who called me an hour before her departure: “Fully financially covered trip, you just need to come” she said. So I went. 

Now she is deep asleep in the last and sweetest hour of the mandatory nightly eight hours, while I am skipping it and writing instead. Lingering in the air is the hotel breakfast smell, hotel breakfasts that I finally know that I truly dislike and would rather skip. I can hear the unfamiliar noises all around me and I already have met with the mirror that did not know me. With the sun rising I stood and looked at the river Qur that flows through the city, and I felt it, the calling, the calling I love, the calling of home.