Twenty one things from one evening

There are two of you in this photo. You are in the mirror as well, caught from behind with both arms up, and that one is not posing for anything.

Your phone is lying face down on the sofa beside you. Screen against the leather. At an event, in the evening, with something clearly going on somewhere else in that building.

You are sitting right on the front edge of the seat. Not back in it. That is how somebody sits when they have stopped for a minute rather than settled in.

There are balloons in the mirror behind you. So there was a celebration happening, and you had come out here where it was quiet.

Your eyes are down. Not at the camera, not at the room, not at anybody.

There are three completely different things on one wrist. A red thread, gold, and a small white flower band. One of those was tied on you by somebody. One you chose. One was almost certainly handed to you that evening.

The red thread is the one thing you are wearing that matches nothing else. You kept it on anyway, which tells me it was never up for discussion.

Your hand is in your hair, but it is not fixing anything. It is mid movement. Half a second earlier or later and it is somewhere else.

It is dark outside. You can see night sitting in the windows in the mirror.

You are the only person in the frame, in a room built for a hundred of them.

That sofa is the reddest thing in the building and you are in the one colour that argues with it. Nobody plans that and it works.

You are one colour from your shoulder to the floor. One decision made once, and then held all the way down.

The shine on you is only at the edges. Everything in the middle is plain. You put the detail where it would be seen and nowhere else.

Your body is turned one way and your face is turned the other. Half of you was leaving and half of you was still there.

No bag anywhere near you. You left it somewhere with somebody. There is a person in that building you do not think twice about.

The end of what you are wearing has spilled onto the floor and you have not once reached down to move it.

There is gold on the walls, gold on the mirror, gold on the arm of that sofa. You are the only thing in the whole picture that is not shining back at anybody.

The you in the mirror is mid gesture. The you facing the camera is completely still. Same second, two different people.

You are not smiling, and it is not a sad face either. It is the face of somebody taking a minute before going back in.

All of this happened in roughly two seconds, and for every one of them you were only thinking about your hair.