"Just three", I said, smiling at the sales assistant and slightly lifting the garments hanging from my right hand.
"Certainly", she replied with a smile and turned to fetch a fuchsia coloured plastic tag with three little holes in it which she promptly handed to me. I made my way to the first available change room, hanging the clothes on a hook and utilising one of the little holes in the plastic tag to hang that up also.
Never having been to the change rooms in this particular store before, I was puzzled for a moment to notice that the mirror was angled away from the partition on one side. I glanced across the spacious change room at the three mirrors on the other side and suddenly realised what a marvellous service they had provided. These three mirrors would let me see the front and sides of myself at the same time and I would be able to see the back of myself in the reflection of the other mirror! No more would I have to turn and dance about and twist my head like a possessed woman from the exorcist in order to see how I looked from all angles. I wondered how many other women had also celebrated with glee at this discovery.
Suddenly my joy turned to horror as I looked at my reflection from the back and immediately had a Hermione Granger moment when she saw the back of herself in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
"Is that really what my hair looks like from the back??!!"
It was nothing like how I imagined. I turned to different angles and kept looking hoping that maybe at some angle my hair would transform into the impossibly sleek and styled hair of my hopelessly deluded imagination. No matter how I turned, my fantasy was not to be fulfilled. My gaze turned to how I looked from the back generally, wondering if the figure I cut gave the right gender cues.
I was brought back to reality when I realised time was passing and that I had yet to try on the clothes I had brought in. I consoled myself with the thought that I shared the same problems as Hermione.
As I left the change room, the thoughts still mulled in my mind. It's easy to imagine how things are until we actually see them with our own eyes. This might be a dose of reality which we can then accept and move forward from (like my hair), or it may be something which we can work on and change. So, if you ever see me hunching and rounding my shoulders, please remind me to straighten up?
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