My own room was barren except for the same oak table and dresser from twenty years ago, the same chair upholstered a pale teal, with legs that connected and curved in the back, the better to tip it upward in a precarious balance while lost in contemplation, as I often did when I lived in Adams. I spied the same single mattress from my college days when I opened the door to the bedroom, on a frame with a headboard made of black metal that vaguely reminded me of prison bars. A clear plastic bag with sheets and a towel lay on top of it, which only amplified the prison effect, ironic given how it was my younger brother who went to jail my senior year, a fact I barely registered through the haze of classes and finals. I went in and was about to put sheets on the bed when my eye caught a white glint, and I turned to face my reflection against the mirror through the open bathroom door, which I knew was the same kind of mirror from twenty years ago even when it was blurry, a shallow vertical rectangle, its corners rounded. As for the reflection itself, I could only really see the shape of my head from that distance, the yellow outline of my blond hair, the entire reflection brighter on the side closest to the window, receding to near blackness at the lower left corner.

I remembered a game I used to play with myself when I saw my reflection from afar. About twelve feet away, I couldn’t make out the details of my face, could only glean the fuzzy outlines of my eyes and lips, the holes of my nostrils, as the rest of my features blended with my skin. From that distance, I could only imagine what my face would really look like when I got closer.

The words “you look the same” lingered in my mind, and I wondered whether I could imagine myself with a man’s face, knowing that for many years now, I only saw a woman’s face when I looked in the mirror, and it had taken so much sacrifice to bring that reflection into being. I still got plenty of comments online that I looked like a man, insults I brushed off because I trusted my own perception over anyone else’s. It felt perverse, even dangerous, to bring my old face back, the man I used to be.