self portrait with eyes closed.
Maybe you've done this before.
You press pen to paper. You siphon the sight from your eyes. You make a clouded mirror of your mind and sketch your own face from memory, operating on instinct alone. Then you let the light leak back in and take a good look at what you've done.
That modest disaster of dye and disparate lines doesn't begin to resemble what you see when you're prying loose the dirt sunk into your skin at the end of another concave day. But it feels like something true. Because for a moment you weren't trying to make yourself out to be any more than what the darkness sees in you.