Nadim looked in the mirror and sighed. It was his face. It was his face and he was tired of it. Somewhere in the years he’d grown disappointed with his face.
He’d never thought of himself as ugly. But neither had he considered himself handsome. His wife, Amina, disagreed with him, but he knew she was biased. He loved her, and appreciated her. But he knew she was wrong.
His face was… too familiar. Was that it? Too familiar? It looked so much like his father’s face. Not that his father was ugly. And people had told him often over the years that he was the spitting image of his father. It wasn’t resentment; it was inheritance. His father was a good man and Nadim loved him.
And his face was … too changed. Was that it? When he looked at himself in the mirror he saw both his face as it was now and as it was when he was thirty years younger. He saw the lines and scars and the weathering effects of the sun.
‘Maybe I could shave,’ he thought. ‘Or change my hair?’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘If I can’t be perfect, could I, at least, be devoted?’ he asked himself. And he wondered what that meant.
Every difficult moral decision was there, reflected in the lines at the corners of his eyes, the crevice below his lower lip, the scar that jutted across his left cheek. Every long day at work. Every mortgage payment. Every parent teacher conference. He wiped the condensation from the glass and the tears from his eyes.
He could hear Amina calling him to breakfast. He could smell the coffee.
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