The room was small and the mirror was long. There were four of us, and only one of us was being looked at, and we had all of us agreed, in writing and aloud and again at the door, to exactly this.
I was the one being looked at. I had asked to be.
This is the part that takes the longest to explain, even to people who already understand the rest. I did not want to be touched, that night. I had said so. What I wanted — what I had wanted for a long time, in a way I had only recently learned how to name — was to be witnessed. To stand in a room with people I had chosen and to let them see me, on purpose, with no part of me hidden behind the small lies I usually wore in public. The lies of posture. The lie of the half-smile. The lie of being someone who does not want anything.
The other three were a couple I had known for two years and a friend of theirs I had met three times and trusted by the careful instinct one develops about such things. We had spent an hour over wine first, in the front room, talking about nothing — the weather, a film one of them had seen, the difficulty of finding decent bread in this part of the city. The ordinariness was deliberate. It was a way of agreeing, without saying so, that what was about to happen was not a rupture in our lives but a small continuous part of them. When the wine was finished, we did not announce a beginning. We simply moved, one by one, into the back room where the mirror was, and we took our places, and we began.
My place was in front of the mirror. Theirs was the long low couch against the opposite wall, from which they could see both me directly and me-in-the-mirror, two of me, the front and the back, the performance and the seam.
I had practiced this alone. Not the standing — the standing was easy. The being-watched. I had set up my phone on a tripod and recorded myself for a week, twenty minutes a night, and watched the footage the next morning, and at first I had hated every frame, the small unconscious correctness of my own body when it knew it was being recorded, the way I held my shoulders as if for a photograph at a wedding. Slowly, over the week, the correctness had gone out of me. By the seventh night I had been able to stand in front of the lens and breathe and let my face do whatever my face wanted to do, which turned out to be more interesting than I had feared and less interesting than I had hoped. That was the preparation. That was the only way I knew how to get ready.
The couple sat on the left side of the couch and the friend sat on the right, and there was a careful foot of space between them, and none of them spoke. This had also been agreed: no instruction, no praise, no commentary. They were here to look. I was here to be looked at. The looking would be the thing.
I undressed slowly, because I had decided in advance to undress slowly, and because doing what I had decided in advance to do was, that night, a form of self-possession I needed. I did not look at them. I looked at the mirror, at the woman in the mirror, who was me and was also someone slightly more honest than me, the way the person in any mirror always is. I watched her hands undo the buttons. I watched her step out of the soft trousers I had chosen for the way they fell. I watched her fold them, because she had decided in advance to fold them, and because the folding was a small punctuation between sentences.
The air in the room changed. Not loudly. A small intake of breath from one of them, I think the friend, then absorbed back into the silence. I felt it land on my skin like the first drop before rain. I did not turn. The agreement was that I would not turn until the end, and the agreement was holding me upright the way a wall holds up a vine.
I cannot tell you what they saw. I can only tell you what I felt seen as. I felt seen as a body that had decided. That was the word that came up in me, standing there, the woman in the mirror breathing the same breath I was breathing — decided. I had spent so much of my life being looked at by accident, looked at on the street, looked at in offices, looked at in the soft sideways way of family, looked at as something to be assessed and adjusted around. To be looked at on purpose, by people who had agreed to look on purpose and had nothing else to do for the next half hour but look, was a different thing entirely. It was almost the opposite thing.