The Mirror Gives No Notes

December third. There are exactly twelve minutes between when Simone and I both arrive and when the floor actually opens, and we have somehow filled all twelve of them, every shift, with the same activity: standing in front of the break room mirror deciding if we look like ourselves yet.

I don't know when this started. At some point it was just the thing we do. Simone checks the gold pin she wears on her collar, a small one, barely visible, silver-adjacent, technically against the uniform in spirit if not in letter, and I do whatever I'm doing with my hair, which Simone has described as 'very focused for something that ends the same way every time.' She's not wrong.

Today she held up her phone at the angle that catches both of us in the mirror and said, without any preamble, 'I'm documenting this.' I didn't ask what she was documenting. I think she means the ritual in general. The fluorescent light in there is extremely honest, no shadows, no flattery, just the two of us under the kind of illumination that belongs in an evidence photo. We look fine. We always look fine. The mirror just doesn't say so out loud.

Two people, one mirror, zero consensus on whether we're ready

Simone's summary of my pre-shift routine, delivered after I finally untied and retied my apron: 'You're very thorough for someone who is then going to carry plates for five hours.' I told her thorough is a personality trait and she said 'so is expedient' and then we went and did our jobs.

She has been like this for four minutes. I timed it.

There is a commenter on an old post I've been turning over in my head, unrelated to any of this, just a thing sitting in the background, but the break room mirror is its own category of reality check, and today it won.