The wall is marked, here and there, by lumps of what might have been dust, immured now beneath a thin layer of beige paint. At around eye level, a rectangular cluster of marks which may once have been the tacky, adhesive residue left behind by a strip of masking tape, and above that, a particularly smooth portion of wall, as if it had been passed over with a level for no particular reason: just here, just one quick pass of the tool, so that it stands out from the otherwise uneven markings on the walls, made uniform only by this one stretch of smooth paint, which denies, and so confirms, the uniformity of these chaotic clusters of paint, dust, and debris.

A triangular lens of dust covers the topmost quarter of the mirror. Better to say: the better part of the topmost quarter. An even isosceles triangle emerging from the lefthand side, and terminating at a point which might be 7/8ths of the distance across the width of the mirror. Here and there, fingerprints, small smudges, a more or less even scattering of dots like a worn-out daguerreotype of something by Seurat or Signac, the original image indistinguishable, even if it is still marred by these more or less uniform clusters of dust.

You wash the dust and lint from the soles of your bare feet, which are a greyish-blue by this point. The same issue does not seem to occur, you notice, when wearing socks. But then, perhaps the dust, the lint, unevenly scattered across the floor, your walls, your mirror, has merely been incorporated into the fabric, and has therefore become indistinguishable from it—a phenomenon which, of course, could not be reproduced on skin.