Creative Process part 2a
Hudson squeezed his eyes shut in one last attempt to recall the image that was the source of his future glory. Only a gauche image of Pocket, the yapping Chihuahua, adorned with jewels like a pet embalmed in an Egyptian tomb, would consolidate in those blurred pixels. He gave up.
The French Workbook in front of him provided little distraction from what he was beginning to conceive of as Something Infinite Lost. After attempting to fill out a few more conjugations, he gave that up as well. He needed a space to contemplate beauty and his workspace in the homework apartment was not it. It was the bathroom.
With a sense of being watched, he strutted to the bathroom, still gripping his blazer sleeves. He had always thought it was a questionable decorating choice to have an entire wall mirrored in there, but he’d come to appreciate it. He flicked the toilet lid down and sat. In front of him was a blond, young man, or maybe a boy. It was hard to tell. His build might have been the skinnyness of boyhood, or the leanness of young adulthood. His blazer squared off his shoulders, making the differentiation all but impossible. As he stared into his eyes, he tried to evaluate his own beauty. But the image was too familiar. He couldn’t see himself through a stranger’s eyes, the eyes of someone who had no information but the pure visual aesthetic impact of his form. He had a vague sense of his features and that they were each, alone, pleasing, but combined, he couldn’t view the image as anything but Hudson. It wasn’t, as he had thought a moment ago, that it was because the image was so familiar that he could not evaluate it, but because he could not escape the knowledge that it was himself he was looking at. And he desperately wanted to be beautiful.
