I almost rejected my Manhattan apartment when I saw my mirrored face in the bathroom. My reflection only works under Hollywood lighting. Then I think, Hello, fine, more or less handsome still. In poorly lit mirrors, the gaunt lined visage, folds starkly visible from cheek to chin, frightens and depresses me. My thoughts sag. Who wants that face? The day is ruined, a bag of heavy coal dragged around till bedtime.
When I lived with my ex in Brooklyn, I’d designed the perfect mirror over the perfect vanity. You can do better if you want, it would tell me. You still have options. A bit goady, that mirror, but it gave me hope. Unlike gazing into my partner’s eyes, where I often saw a sad facsimile of my own isolation. When he eventually moved out, I needed that mirror’s quick solace each night. Imagine, choosing to end a relationship after twenty years. There must be a reward for such courage.
For a while, there was. Within months I knew every local face on the apps. Every man cruising in South Brooklyn. Several came through, some twice. I needed one nice one to stay. Instead, my aloneness shapeshifted, from a porcupine to a red-eyed creature that padded across the apartment all night. Even friends fell away during Covid, from screens to silence. Stories about my situation began calcifying in my head. Stories that ended with me unable to rise from bed on too many days: Daddy’s fuckable but tired. Desperate.
Despite its chancy mirror, I took the place in Manhattan. A fresh start was vital in my mid-fifties, or I’d grow grey with immobility. I thought, I can make a different story here. In which I host new friends in my high apartment full of light. We’d go to bars and bistros in this neighborhood of students and teachers, of noisy abuelas playing dominoes on corners, of merengue on Sunday streets. I’d redo the whole bathroom, lights, fixtures, everything. I’d lather and shave under a warm glow and be pleased by what the razor revealed. Look. I’m vital yet.
I paid a contractor a solid advance. He promised deliverance on a schedule. Then he blew me off, days stretching to weeks. I began to dread morning ablutions. A medicine cabinet hung crookedly in a corner. A row of square face-sized mirrors filled another wall. The bare ceiling bulb accentuated my flaws, spots and shadows mocking me. I felt the familiar pull of self-loathing paralysis, of grinding year by year towards decrepitude.
The mirrors wouldn’t hush: Changing us won’t change anything. This is who you are now.
The contractor had to come. Quick.
Almost two decades ago, I first noticed V-shaped brow lines that wouldn’t relax. I believed I had some sort of immunity from wrinkles. I remember touching the furrows and thinking: Is this what years and years of strain does?
Over TV dinner, my partner glanced sideways at me. Was he struck by the telltale lines too? I was counting on his politeness and reserve. But he said: Your skin is greying, dear. On the side of your cheeks. In the same tone as one might say: Your haircut looks nice, dear. You missed a button on your shirt, dear.
You leaving me for some fresh-faced twink? I cried. He rolled his eyes. Still, I was deeply rattled, about this new reality and that he’d named it. Happens with age, he said. No big deal.
But it was. It was a big deal. I wanted to hide until I could fix myself. My partner didn’t know how long I’d been fantasizing about leaving him. We were so very green when we met: We thought bonding over childhood neglect was glue enough to keep us together. For years we’d been doubling down, building our lives on the wet sand of passionless expediency. Our incompatibilities almost amusing: parts of him off-limits because contact made him break out, and me stir-crazy for touch anytime everywhere.
Cracks were showing not only around my eyes. A part of me wanted the walls to fall, and I was also terrified. I’d be out in the fracas, the free marketplace of faces.
I tried telling him, month after month, but couldn’t, despite the roiling inside. I marched, instead, to a dermatologist’s office, broke through at least that hesitation.
I told her I came to have my moles and sunspots examined. They were proliferating on my torso but hidden beneath my shirt. I’d seen plenty on my mother as she aged. As the doctor checked, I made small talk. Is sunblock necessary when it’s cloudy? How much SPF for daily use? Then I slipped in my other concerns. Didn’t realize I was vain, ha, ha, I said, not quite meeting her eyes. Shouldn’t have smoked those cigarettes in college. The dermatologist, a white lady of indeterminate age, didn’t frown or smile, just nodded in an I-hear-you sort of way. She brought her face, translucent as mother of pearl, close to mine, and surveyed the map of my hide. Then she leaned back and made some notes. I thought I’d get a grade, but instead she handed me a list of products: non-soap facial cleanser, Vitamin C serum, nighttime retinol treatment, eye cream. Together, these would prevent fine lines, possibly even redact them, and clarify and brighten my tone. She mentioned the plumping power of hyaluronic acid. My spirit leapt, an unbridled steed.
The items were on sale at the dermy’s office. We recommend people start these in their mid 20s, she said. But it’s not too late to stop further damage. And please don’t smoke.
I used the products diligently. I kept smoking down to a secret cigarette while walking the dog, searching nightly for the kernels of love that had fallen from my heart, or the courage to admit they were lost forever. My partner and I were miserably addicted to the accruals that come with staying entangled; the security of someone to come home to in a tough town. Every morning, watching him dress, I picked a card from my mental stack: stay because I’m aging, leave because I’m aging, work on my inner demons first, fuck the demons and just work on my cheeks.
The lines around my eyes did diminish over time, as did the awful bags starting to take hold. My partner never mentioned my dulling face again. By then we spoke of so little of significance. In addition to money on products, I paid to have our bathroom renovated, so every day I’d get a boost under three downward facing sconces. The strange assurance of a pleasant illusion.
I learned to be cautious around random mirrors in hotels and people’s houses. To always check the lighting. If disheartened at first glance, step back or turn slightly. And strictly avoid irredeemable situations, such as the wicked witch’s portal on a cupboard at my parents’ that showed me the shape of things to come.
In this regard I could not be more different than my mother. When I visited her in Delhi, I noticed how she always sat with such ease at her dressing table, gazing gently at her reflection as she cleaned and moisturized, as though silently communing with her best friend. The only light she needed a stark reading lamp clamped to the table’s edge. How did she find that comfort with herself even as the years gathered into decades on her face? She was regal and beautiful until the day she died.
As I passed my mid-forties, my ex and I were still enmeshed. I acted superficially serene, so no one saw how despondent I was inside, the way you are with one foot out. People started telling me I looked “distinguished.” I felt more like a ravaged battlefield—heavy artillery had sagged and folded the terrain. I tried to tilt my head just the right way for photos and be mindful of the shadows. I’d smile more when talking to people, though even there one must be careful. Too wide and everything cracks.
Fortunately, I developed a growth on my shoulder and had to revisit the dermatologist. A different one, a South Asian man. He told me not to worry, they’d excise it right away under anesthesia, stitch the wound closed, good as new. They’d test the fatty growth, and most likely it wasn’t malignant. I wasn’t worried. After the procedure I said, Embarrassed to ask, but what are options for deep creases? This dermatologist was a bit plump, which added a healthy sheen and volume to his face. I half-expected some cultural message: Those options are not for men. I hoped for some validation: Nothing to worry about yet. Instead, he told me about the difference between Botox, peels, abrasions, and dermal fillers, which procedures they could perform in the clinic and which were more appropriate to a spa. Starting now can delay the need for a facelift.
I did not know I was headed for a facelift.
The dermal filler sounded appealing, a safe injection of fatty acid to increase volume and pad grooves. Outpatient, some mild swelling, fast recovery. The doc handed me shiny literature, with before and after photographs. I hid the brochure from my partner, because to my mind it was a clue about our possible future. If I went ahead, I’d have to find some way to explain what had happened while he was away for Thanksgiving. My cheeks ate too much, ha ha. Or: I found this new cream. I’m so shallow. But amazing, right? I wondered what I’d tell my family, unabashed as they are in naming every facial development. Don’t frown like your father, Ma had said to me many times, pointing to my brow lines. And yet she’d be stunned if she knew I had work done.
My enthusiasm for the filler dissolved when I realized the procedure had to be repeated every six months. Or sooner. Hundreds of dollars each time. The longest lasting version wasn’t even approved in America then. It was a financial and logistical commitment for life, impossible to hide from one’s intimates. A friend with HIV lipoatrophy traveled to Brazil regularly to get his cheeks plumped. He had all the information. I wished I could learn something else from him: his consistent self-regard, like my mother’s. Plump or gaunt, he was always radiant, beloved by friends, and had at least two lovers.
I opted instead for inversions and facial yoga. And the highest nightly dose of retinol that my skin would tolerate.
When I turned fifty, I put an end to the cigarettes, really truly, except under extreme stress, like when I finally told my partner we were done. We’d tried every remedy to fill the gaps and grooves between us: couple’s counseling, trips together and alone, time apart. I tapped into an unknown well of determination to move forward as he thrashed and howled to stay in the past or make a sad life as roommates if we couldn’t be lovers.
Back in the dating market, I doubled down on day and night creams, a plant-based diet, almost daily gym. All this must, I told myself, amount to some upward force against gravity.
Earlier this year, at my mother’s memorial in Delhi, I saw faces that I hadn’t for years. How remarkable, I thought, the way people change. I spoke to a cousin with espresso cup craters under her eyes. I greeted an uncle with jowls as weighty as jackfruit. Even on my nephews and nieces, time had left its mark. A first forehead line. A cheek that used to be filled now flattened, waiting to be hollowed. In the past few years, I’d seen my parents lose their fat and muscle to surgeries and illness and Covid. I’d witnessed their life force wane.
I’d struggled silently alongside to prevent my own spirit from fading. To keep faith that my loneliness was not a congenital condition. After my breakup, I’d had a late sexual blooming, inexplicable, inconsistent, especially in my travels to care for my parents, with men who seemed unfazed by my flaws but quickly disappeared when I said I loved them. I cannot seem to let go my boneheaded hope of finding the one who doesn’t leave, whose adoring gaze I wake up to each morning. Not because I’m objectively deserving of such a gift, but because I want it so much.
How powerful these longings; when filled with them I believe myself unlined again, desirable again. That only the tincture of time is needed to cure what ails me.
Weeks have become months, and the contractor hasn’t arrived to work on my bathroom. I wonder why I don’t forgo the deposit and hunt for someone else, as painful as every search is in this town. Perhaps part of me is preparing for some radical acceptance of how I look. The problem is, how I look keeps changing, ever more rapidly, so that acceptance must play constant, exhausting catch-up with reality. Every day my bathroom mirrors remind me that time might cure but also steals. I fear I am nearing the downward slopes now, the tumbles after which the friendliest mirror won’t be able to lie. What magic will I need then to be tender with my reflection?
For now, small adjustments and denials get me through the day. Stark white sideways lighting is to be avoided at all costs. I’ve jerry-rigged a warm bulb on top of the medicine cabinet.
Cyberspace is full of postings that say being alone too long causes deep somatic stress, damaging your very DNA. The impact visible, like smoking, grief mapped in creases. If only the fix was easy: an effort of will, a smile in a bar, a rightward swipe, a cream. When I think another solitary night might break me, I remind myself of my two abject decades in a mismatched relationship. Those trapped years aged me in ways I can only see now.
Besides hope and patience, I cultivate a few men who reliably arrive in my new home, for an hour, an evening, a night. I’ve stopped the dance of making them tell me I’m attractive. If they do, I thank them, then move on to ravaging them. For now, their eyes are better mirrors than my own. A gift of my solitude is that it’s taught me to be deeply present for pleasure when it knocks on my door. I shut everything else out for those moments, knowing a hundred torments will have their space soon enough. I hold back from saying I love you too quickly. One guy who tenderly traced the lines on my neck will never be invited again.
The sun burns over us, and in its gaze we stumble through the groove of our existence. We gather gashes and wounds on our skin, from storms and journeys and losses. Every year we do not die gets written on our faces, like tree lines, except ours are more crisscross, unruly.
I might forget the contractor and put the money towards a third dermatologist visit. It might be time to face the knives, to get ready for real change, the nip and tuck. Every year there are fewer people to hide from or explain myself to. If that sharp intervention brings me a decade of rise-and-shine brightness, I’ll take the miraculous days.
I look at myself under the jerry-rigged light and practice-lift the sides of my mouth. A small smile.
More or less handsome still.
