I pressed the razor to my cheek. I felt it rip the hairs roughly off my face. The patch of naked skin stung as the shower’s hot water ran over it.
I hadn’t been clean-shaven in a year and a half.
I don’t remember an exact moment when my ego started to spiral out of control. It’s always been a problem. Always speaking the loudest among my friends. Cutting off girlfriends mid-sentence.
I don’t remember when I stopped catching my bad behavior or when I started to totally lose touch, but eventually I had to sit down at the end of the day — it was inevitable, I guess — and think, “oh god oh god I am so far from the person I want to be.”
My left cheek was mostly shaven. It hurt like hell. I turned the cold water up.
I broke down. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I did not know who I was exactly but that I was not the person who had been borrowing my body for the past few years.
After my first month of college, I showed my old film teacher my first film review. He emailed me the following:
I’m awfully proud of you, Nick. You’re a ridiculously good writer. Continue to keep your ego in check and all will be well.
-Ted Walch.
Guess which sentence I did not take to heart.
One spot below my lip started to bleed. I washed it off with the cold water.
I licked my upper lip. It had a smoothness I had forgotten. Like when I got my braces off. That natural smoothness that’s strange from your forgetting.
My arrogance could have ruined me. It’s obvious now. And it’s embarrassing that I never stopped myself sooner. I never noticed my own swagger. I never bothered to look at myself.
I looked at myself in the mirror after I dried myself off. My face looked young, and to my standards, strangely distorted. Like looking in the mirror during a nightmare.
-
The next day I ran from the beach into the lake dragging the boat dolly behind me. The water chilled my legs. I gritted my teeth. The water ran over the wheels and steel of the dolly and I slipped the dolly underneath the boat and with the little strength I have I hauled the sailboat to the shore.
I uncleated the sheets.
I lowered the boom.
I grasped the halyards and wrestled the sails down.
I untied complex knots that I do not know exactly how to tie yet but I learned about their logic from my undoing them.
