kissing the mirror

Laurie Anderson
March 1995

I used to spend some time seeing a psychiatrist. I would get there around eight in the morning and come into the office and she sat in the corner and on one side of her was a window and the other a mirror and she could tell by slight movements of my eyes whether I was looking at her or at the mirror. I looked at the mirror a lot and one of the things I noticed was that on a Monday it was perfectly clean and clear but by Friday it was covered with these lip marks. This was a process that seemed bizarre at first and then predictable and finally more or less inevitable. Then one day in passing, I said, "It's like the lip marks that appear on your mirror." And she turned around and said, "What lip marks?" And I realised that because of the way the sun was coming through the window and hitting the mirror at an angle that she couldn't see them. So I said, "Why don't you sit in my chair? You can see them from here." And I'd never seen her get up before but she got up (she could actually walk!) and she came and sat in my chair and she said, "Oh! Lip marks." The next time I saw her was the last time. She said she had discovered that her twelve-year old daughter had been coming into the room during the week and had been kissing the mirror and that the maid would come in on the weekends and wash off the marks. And realized that we were seeing things from such literally different points of view that I wouldn't have to see her again.