Fractured Mirrors

13 Jan, 2025

Distance yields to anger yields to sadness yields to softness.
I want to soften next to you, don't want to demonize you.
This isn't a poem, it's a truce.

• The final stanza of Rearview, a poem I wrote that is meant to be read through a mirror (or selfie cam)

This post started as a piece about Covid Grief, but very quickly became about the profound loneliness of realizing that your reality and fundamental truths differ from the people you love. Unsurprisingly, a topic as charged as covid is both very much about covid and not at all about covid. I returned to the end of a poem I wrote called Rearview -- about looking back in time at a relationship that had ended -- and felt like these words spoke to a cycle in all relationships of distance and closeness. This poem has completion (largely because the relationship is thoroughly in the past), but most of these cycles don't. They spin around and around...

...Like grief and love. The other day I pictured grief and love as a smooth round sphere, with one directly and frictionlessly carrying to the other. I have experienced a nearly endless cycle of slipping around this sphere over and over: grief, love, grief, love over the past 5 years.

The majority of people I spend day to day time with are living in some version of this grief-love covid experience on a good day and are navigating anxiety and rage about the state of the pandemic on a bad one. I live in a pretty covid cautious community, and our choices and lifestyles have dramatically changed since 2020. Meanwhile, almost everyone else I'm close with who lives elsewhere is in what feels like an entirely different reality. In 2025, one of the deepest wells of my Covid Grief is actually about that: the ways that this disease has created and unrelentingly highlighted fractures between my reality and others.

In Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger ¹, she explores the idea of the Mirror World. In it, there are many mirrors of ourselves (doppelgangers) who act as our foils. Often we feel an urge to distance ourselves from them, though often the parts we are most disturbed by share some chilling things in common with us. She uses this paradigm to hone in on the strange dissonance of our time politically with the term "Diagonalism" where we see people on the other side of the political spectrum as our opposites, but a closer look reveals the way that rather than being on the "other side" they are on a diagonal line that cuts across both sides. One of the first thoughts I had when I finished the book was: "how do we smash these mirrors?" It was an immediate response to my desire to connect more closely with other people. What would a fractured mirror world look like?

At my Legal Marriage last week, I was introduced to an entirely new way of asking this question. My partner and I had asked our Rabbi to give some Jewish historical context on the lineage of "urgent marriages" And "love in urgent times." She pulled an example from midrash about a section of Exodus in which the Jews were slaves in Egypt and their future looked very bleak. A time when the people's loneliness and hopelessness had reached such a point that many of the despairing members of the community sat alone in fields staring blankly off into the distance. The people had given up.

It was at this time that the Jewish women, sat down next to their despairing husbands with a mirror. They held that mirror in front of both of their faces and said flirtatiously: "I'm more beautiful than you." The husband, briefly awoken from despair replied: "what? I'm more beautiful than you!" This strange and provocative exchange began to connect people back to each other with the time old tradition of flirting and connecting around each other's beauty. But it also connected them (literally physically) around choosing to stare deeply at each other. Not straight in the eyes but through a shared reflection of the world. ²

The most connective experiences I've had around covid have not been with my friends that are as cautious as I am (though I am always grateful to be in a community that has shared access needs with me and I find my choices to be sustainable specifically because I know so many people making similar ones.) They have been moments like when my sibling asked from a place of curiosity rather than agitation about why I'm living the way I am to understand me better, or when my mom pivoted an indoor dining plan to a sheltered outdoor one. These small gestures that say "I want to come closer to you" are things that have stuck with me for months.

I have also had connective experiences around moments where I stretch my boundaries to come closer to someone I love and they see that I'm expanding my world to connect with them. Or when my partner and I make a choice together to change our protocols and boundaries in ways that increase our risk so that one of us can do something important to us. When I push myself to be more porous than my norms and come closer to others.

I am hungry for connection (all the time, my whole life) and want to explore what it means to flirt in the mirror as a way through the suffering I feel when I feel distant from others because of our fractured realities. I started with the covid frame, but there are many ways I've experienced this fracturing, and many ways I've felt distant. There was a moment last year in the midst of facilitating a synagogue community discussion of Israel and Palestine where I felt a huge spiritual tug upon the realization that I was standing in a room full of people with very different realities. Same facts, different truths. It felt like a Quantum realization that so many different worlds exist inside of this one world. I nearly cried.

I am still (likely forever) trying to find my lines between standing my ground on my beliefs and moving towards others, but I don't see those 2 things as binary opposites, more like related projects with many interdependencies. "Connecting to people," while existentially important, is not a "politic." It does, however, lead to a lot of good politically and is pre-work (and continuing work) for anything important to my politics. Most of the political thinkers I resonate most with start from a place of love and care, and most of my political beliefs stem from the ways I connect to others.

For the people I love, I know that I will never be able to bring them into the same exact world that I live in, but I can do my best to authentically show it to them and they can give me a tour of theirs. Maybe all of the mirrors together make a prism and are a reflection of the infinite worlds inside our world. I hope so. I will never stop hungering for connection, so I'll keep looking for the holy edges of realities: The places where our worlds can never be the same. I'll keep looking for moments where I can hold my mirror to someone, and let them hold theirs to me. And when it's time, and the mirrors break and smash, I'm eager to see who we are in the fractured glass.