The Mirror Part 3: This Is Happening
Charlie knows everything will change. All his friends are graduating and moving on to a new chapter of the book of their lives — he is painstakingly aware of the number of days until he can join them. With just moments before Sam leaves Charlie gives her one last gift — not flowers, or jewelry, nor a stuffed bear for her dorm room — his books. The tools Bill gave him so he would realize he is not small and deserves more, Charlie now gives Sam so her interior might become visible to her, and she will know she is not small.
This legibility of self is the inheritance of the writing. Each author wrote the novels from their experiences — their pain — and in doing so discovered themselves. Bill, standing at his own glass, read these novels and his interior became known to him. He grew up to write his own discovery of self. Charlie received the inheritance from Bill, and through the reading, learned who he is — a writer. He completes the cycle by passing the inheritance to Sam, as he begins to write himself. Through his writing, and the movie adaptation, I now have more legibility of my interior.
At every stage, the giver has not been completed by the work. Bill never finished writing, and was unsure teaching was his future. Charlie has only just begun claiming his place. None of that stops the inheritance. The work moves forward regardless of whether the giver has been completed by it.
This is what Face Against the Glass is.
These essays are diagnostic instruments produced from my own writing-into-legibility. The inheritance is for the reader standing at their own glass, even if you don’t yet have language to describe what you see. The inheritance is for you.
The film is about being seen. Bill sees Charlie first, then Patrick and Sam. The people at the party. Secret Santa. And Charlie sees himself. This facilitates the doctor seeing Charlie, and then finally, his parents. How many will it take for you? The film ends with the convergence of being seen, the inheritance, and the writer made legible through the writing.
“But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here. And I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful.”
For the entire film, Charlie has been writing about his life. Observing it from a slight distance. Making it legible to himself by putting it on the page. Practicing being seen by someone who cannot see him. The writing has been the apparatus by which he survives a life he cannot quite enter. But here, at the end, the writing stops. He is not narrating. He is not observing from outside. He is in the moment. The writing has done its work. The inheritance has reached him. And he is here.
This is what the writing is finally for. Not the writing itself. The moment when the writing brings the writer to a place where he can stop writing and simply be present.
I write because this world doesn’t make sense if I don’t. So the writer may be discovered through the writing. Standing at the glass for so long, I write so an inheritance may be passed to someone familiar with the view from outside. I see you standing outside — in darkness and cold — looking through the glass. You are standing in the footprints of those that came before you. I can pass along the inheritance while I wait for the writing to bring me to the moment I can stop writing. I write so that she will read my words — look up — and open the door for me. I write for the moment when we are together — in the warmth only she can provide — and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful.