Wants, Tightrope, Spilt Milk

Part Three #34: Morning

Casper stood in front of the mirror and turned his head from side to side whilst moving his neck to pull the skin tight around his jaw. Lines stood out on both sides of his mouth, lines that appeared each time he drank heavily yet faded if he stayed sober. In the past such fading had been quick and concise, hiding his drinking as if in collusion with the habit. Of late however, such lines had been slower to fade, leaving a lingering shadow that was the loss of youth. The optimism, the endless time and limitless possibilities, all seemed to be vanishing into those tiny lines.

Yet wrinkles were the least of Casper’s worries that morning. As with those that had once appeared under his eyes and upon his forehead, he had gotten used to those around his mouth. He saw them now as nothing to worry over, for lines as they may be they were still the lines of someone who was overall youthful, who still had a few years yet in which to hide behind the illusion of being younger. This morning, as with all mornings now after he had been drinking, the problem was his face in general. The line of his jaw seemed to vanish a bit more with each drink as if there were tiny holes in his mouth into which liquid seeped and bulked up the skin till it no longer lined his jaw with tautness and angles but dissolved into the neck, one line unbroken by chin or bone.

Then there were his cheeks, an area in which the same inflation of skin seemed to be taking place, the same bloating. He thought about something he had read about Jim Morrison and River Phoenix, about how all the drinking and drugs had ravaged them before their premature deaths, how alcohol had bloated their faces and taken the sheen out of their eyes; the loss of youth at the bottom of a bottle. He thought of Mickey Rourke, that former raging alcoholic with the weather-beaten, disastrous face, a reminder of what drinking can do to even the most resilient of features.

He pulled his skin taut again and thought of his youth, thought of the advent of time, the slow loss of everything. On occasion he felt like he was upon a cliff’s edge being pushed further and further toward the fall, time ticking away around him and all that he could have been, all that he could have done, all getting further away. He wasn’t envious of youth; of those young people he taught and saw most days. They would have their demise just as he was having his. No, he was envious of himself when he was younger. Of all the time he had wasted drinking instead of progressing and following his dreams.

Yet still he drank. He drank for the memories he felt he had lost by drinking. He drank for the reasons he shouldn’t, for the lines and for his jaw. He drank with the intention of stopping, with the illusion that in a few days time he would never drink again. Yet he was still too close to youth for such intentions to bear much weight, too close to the idea that he could do anything. Even with the realisation that his youth was fleeting, that the extra year he had on others was vanishing with each drink he consumed, still he drank, and still he would drink. For despite the ravages he knew were approaching, the joy it brought, the comfort and familiarity, made everything else seem so far away.

He contemplated shaving, wondering as he had many times before if the stubble that darkened his lower face hid the erosion of his jaw line or simply drew attention to it. He knew that he looked younger when he shaved but then sometimes he felt that the ruggedness of not shaving was in itself youthful, albeit an older form of youth. Some sort of timeless youth that was both old and young at the same time, an act of fashion that one could say was never in style, but also never out of style if one was able to pull it off. He had once gone a few years without properly shaving, keeping a layer of stubble the whole time that he felt made him look older. Now he stood before the mirror, looking at an older and more bloated version of the same face he had always peered upon, asking the same questions he always had yet desiring an illusion of youth rather than age.

In fact he didn’t really care either way. It was only the drinks of the night before that made him reflect upon his reflection. The drinks always made him act as such in the morning. One could suppose the general feeling of illness, tiredness and depression that accompanied an uneventful drunken night swept over him and he found himself before the mirror, looking at each facet of his face so intently that it grew gigantic, bigger than anyone else could have ever seen but as stark and obvious to him as the Harbour Bridge.