I was sitting in the back of my mom's car on Tuesday evening, as she drove my brother and I back home. The sun was still above the horizon but it was getting annoyingly close, and my mom was wearing sunglasses as we barreled down the freeway. I stared out the window at all the scenery whizzing by, and as I observed the way the ochre/sunset-imminent light bathed the whole world in an outlandish bright n' dark emsemble, I came to the amazing realization that the beautiful colors on most of the flora outside were just the wavelengths that they didn't need to use for photosynthesis being bounced off. Light which was useless trash for the sorry-looking shrubs the government planted on the freeway was pleasing green photons for the rods and cones (or actually, just the cones) of humans passing by at speeds in excess of sixty-five miles an hour, too fast for many to even bother noticing such things.

It takes me nineteen years after being born and three after aceing A.P. Bio to realize this.

After I had this little revelation of sorts, I looked away from the window and stared into the rear view mirror, to get a look at my mom's face. Actually, to make a composite picture of my mom's face. What I mean by that is that the rear view mirror (like most of today's rear view mirrors) is made so that you have to set it at one angle for night driving and another for day driving. However, this special feature also means that if the light hits the mirror right and you're at the right angle, you can see two different images in the mirror, both of which are sort of transparent and merge into each other. So when I looked into the mirror, I saw the bottom half of my mother's face in the top half of the mirror, and the top half of her face in the bottom half of the mirror.

So as I sat there in the backseat, I stared at the mirror and for a fun mental game I tried to take that half-and-half image and make a composite picture in my mind of my mom's whole face. (I'm easily amused, I guess.) It wasn't easy - first of all, it's a rather confusing image; secondly, I didn't want my mom to catch me staring at her face, and since she had on her sunglasses there was no way I could tell if she was noticing me or not.

I had to content myself with taking surreptitious glances at the double reflection in the rear view mirror, but no matter how hard I tried and how many glances I took I couldn't take the fractured image and turn it into a picture of my mother. It felt like my brain was "muffled," like I had a disc of plastic stuck in my brain; like if my neurons could only figure out a way to send their signals AROUND the plastic instead of through it, I could make that composite picture. It's like that annoyingly light, suffocatingly mind-numbing feeling of brain strain you feel when you wake up from a dream and you're lying there remembering it for a moment or two, and then in the next second you can't remember the dream anymore and you're lying there trying to retrieve it in vain.

As I took one more look at the rear view mirror, I got confused cause this thought hit me like a freight train: I started wondering whether or not I was really doing this as a mental game or if I wanted to memorize my mother's face as she was driving down the freeway, and then right in the next instant, I got this overwhelming feeling of dread. I didn't want my mother to die. It started repeating over and over in my head like don't die don't die I don't care if she's "only" going to be forty-seven this year and I don't care if most people still think she's thirty-six cause without her make-up she looks forty-three she's not that old but gawd compared to how she was when I was six there's no comparison and she gets tired more easily nowadays and I worry every time she gets a cold and now she gets colds more often and she used to be so fit but now she's five pounds overweight and she's so tired she's been through too much I want to get rich so I can give her a good life before she dies she was so tired today don't die don't die dontdiedontdiedontdie-

I would have gone on like that with that train of "thought" for quite a while, but then my mother looked up into the mirror to stare at my reflection in it, and she asked me if I had enjoyed dinner. Her voice immediately stopped the sanity-killing loop playing in my head.

I grinned at the half-and-half reflection in that schizophrenic mirror, looked into her sunglasses even if I couldn't see the eyes behind them no matter how hard I tried to conquer that plastic disc phenomenon, and said simply, "Yes."