Two Way Mirror

After sitting in front of television for most of my day watching Scooby-Doo, the same scene was reoccurring. The villain would be lurking and Scooby and Shaggy would meet eye-to-eye then the villain would try to grab them but he would miss only by seconds. You can tell a lot about a person by how they act in front of the mirror. There are the ones whom always take way too long, the ones whom must fix every flaw, the ones who never make eye contact with themselves, and the ones who never know what quite they are looking at. I think of a mirror as a window to my life.

My face is a composite of my sister and my aunt. When I see my eyes I see my sister--our eyes are mirror-images of each other's, give or take a few freckles. I see her big doe eyes staring at me intensely, trying her best to be with me even though she’s gone away from me. When I see my face, my mother’s family albums interrupt my vision. I see my Aunt Lorena’s nose, which was shaped by years of trying to configure computer codes in ill lighting. My Aunt Ida’s mouth from where she closed her mouth too much when it came to dilemmas. My Aunt Melissa’s cheeks that had to endure years of the unjust sun.

My hands have created my future. They are soft and petite but on the right hand a long white sliver interrupts the never-ending pattern. The cause of this scar happened on a long December night where, hoping to fulfill all of my childhood dreams of Christmas, my father decided to put a red light bulb on the leader of the metal reindeer. While holding the light bulb,my hand had been sliced by metal a antler. I don’t remember the pain; I just remember the look of sheer shock in my sister’s eye that I knew I would share too. I looked down and saw blood and skin hanging down and the trail of blood from outside. After that I see just blurs of what happened next. I remember crying, as I looked down at my hands because they would never look like my mothers’. My mother’s hands were skinny and had vivid blue veins erupting from the dark plain. As a toddler I remember the feel of her soft and bony hands with fair scars that flowed up into her arms. The scars were caused by a reckless childhood that consisted of playing in cornfields, building mud pies, sneaking though orchards trying to taste the sweetest fruit in the Valley of Texas. Her hands were soft from the soil of orchards that she later had to farm for money. Her veins were plump from the amount of blood that followed through them as she lifted heavy crates of fruits and carry five of her siblings. Her scars led to her shoulder where a stitched circle frames a dark mole that runs through the Esperiqueta descendants.

My skin has taken the color of the desert where I was born. After years of being blown around by the Santa Ana winds and being fortressed in by tumbleweeds, my skin now echoes the particles of dirt in those gust of winds. The tumbleweeds caused my skin to by pushed around in the never-ending winds. The Joshua trees caused my bones to stand tall and frigid because you will never know when lighting might strike and burn you to sticks.

Through the process of Meiosis, everyone has the same number of alleles, two chromosomes, and the same proteins running through our DNA. What makes the person looking at us through the window of our souls? My window shows me a place where I see the troubles of my families past, the problems I face, and the mistakes that got me to this window. Our DNA is the same, but what makes each person, villain, and hero different is the order they are put in and the environmental effects.