Have you ever taken a photo of yourself with the sheer intent of tearing it apart? Not ripping it down the center - no, allowing it to live its life fully as a photograph, the uncensored reproduction of you and your wholeness. But that's just when the 'tearing' begins: you blow it up to highlight your uneven skin, you draw lines and circles over your entire face to reveal asymmetries; then you begin to wonder if this 'wholeness' is just a haphazard assemblage of incompatible parts.
Stare at your portrait for two minutes and you'll start to recognize yourself again. Stare at it for five and you can consider yourself vain. But to reassert your power over this forced image - the 'you' that (apparently) everyone else sees (except you) - is all but impossible without certain sacrifice: destroy the mirror, keep the photograph, or keep the mirror, destroy the photograph. Either way, to-be-whole-again-ness is borne from the destruction of a surface, and I promise you they're both inhumanly difficult to break.
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