reflection

This morning on my way to my first lesson I again experienced a reoccurring sensation that I've often heard other people describe, but haven't felt so strongly until recently. 'Like you're watching a movie about yourself' is how it's often described, and that's pretty much how it feels to me. Not a scary movie, not a comedy, just like someone set up the whole shot and I was an actor, or maybe just an extra in someone else's story.
I woke up at 6:00, two minutes before my alarm went off as usual. This is a fun little game my brain plays with my heart every morning. 5:58 looks exactly like midnight, 2 am, 3:28 am, etc. So i wake up and think 'awesome, it's the middle of the night, I'm going to sleep for 17 more hours'. Then the alarm goes off. I always grab it and jab the button to tell me the time (it's my cell), sure that the phone has malfunctioned or just changed itself while I was asleep. (Like Dane Cook's alarm clock that grows legs and plays 'little clock games' with him.) Then, after several rounds with the snooze button, I get up and fumble around with clothes and papers and my laptop and somehow end up on the little elevator that descends into the day, which has only just arrived.
Here's where the 'movie' sensation starts. I have my bag on my shoulder, a black leather attache case that Katharine was getting rid of, my earplugs in, usually something soothing, like Mark Kozelek or Gillian, and moments after walking out my front door, enter the metro station nearest my house, Karlova Namesti. Once down the mile-long escalator I'm integrated into a crowd of people, dare I say a throng, that moves like cattle - long-faces, purposeful jockeying for position, bumping into one another and finally squeezing into a metro car, with me somewhere in the middle. Like any crowded train car, people glance around at each other, then choose a place to lock their gaze on like they're preparing for some sudden pain. (Is that how people feel about their day? Is that how I feel?) I do the same, but often, like other people I'm sure, find myself staring back at my own reflection in the glass. I have my red Team Zissou hat on, white earplugs in, my new glasses that still look like a disguise, and a long gray overcoat that goes down to my knees. Under all that is some guy who used to make furniture in a dusty shop, a guy whose morning routine was taking clamps off table tops and loading up the wood-stove. In another life he would walk a mile along broken concrete to the top of a hill where vultures glided around the roof of the school. In another he put a book on tape on and drove 40 minutes through the Blue Ridge Mountains to a small town where literacy was a losing battle. I stare at him in the black glass of the train window and try to remember when things changed, how it could be that I was there and am now here, like the maps in the back of the bible I had growing up, a red line to mark Paul's 3rd jaunt around the middle east, or the map that shows Indiana Jones' plane move from Germany to India.
But how? How did it happen? Wasn't I just learning how to knead dough? Weren't we just making shrimp and grits in the kitchen on Chestnut St, with the music on real loud and people steadily arriving with beer and bread and wine?
I walk into my room at the end of the days and am surprised by it almost every time. The clothes in the closet look like a grown-ups clothes - shirts, ties, two jackets. I put my black briefcase down for what feels like the first time all day and massage some feeling back into my shoulder. I take off my disguise and rub my eye sockets, then put them back on when I realize I'm used to them now and can get a headache without them. I make tea and sit in the comfy chair in my room and look out the window at the dark clouds over bright wet rooftops. Soon it's dark enough to see myself staring back again, and this time, I recognize the face.
I don't sit long. I know the morning's waiting in the elevator for me. I get up, put some music on, something upbeat like Modern Times or Old Crow, get out some charcoal and start putting my new easel to use.
Lately I've taken to doing self-portraits with a big mirror I have in my room. When I look at them the next morning, they look strange. Do I really look like that? I always think my face is still chubby, like when I was in 6th grade and am surprised to see hard lines, sharp angles. Then I remember that I'm almost 30 and spend most of my days walking quickly through a strange city. I remember that I came here because I wanted to see a new place and have new experiences, because I vowed not to spend another winter in the woodshop.
Thin light is coming in my window, I'm somehow awake and dressed and my briefcase is packed and ready to go. I put on my coat, pull on my hat, insert the earplugs and head out to the elevator, which takes me down 5 flights and deposits me into my new life with a soft thud.