Imitations

At my therapist's office stands a desk made to look like fine furniture. Gustav Stickley's ghost is big around these parts. His factory still stands in a suburb nearby. Over a hundred years later, it houses a library instead of furniture and woodworkers. I'm carrying a book borrowed from that library. A slim collection of poetry I'm too anxious right now to read. The book is pure craft and rhythm. I am something else entirely. Stickley furniture is beautiful. Form, function, artistry, grace. Stickley pieces weren't made to look like anything else. They were exactly what they were built to be. Originals. The desk at my therapist's office, well, that's a pale imitation in every sense. A disappointment. I set the book of poems on its surface and open the top drawer. Inside, I find the Allen wrench and instruction booklet used to assemble it from whatever cardboard box in which it shipped. The instructions in English, Spanish, and maybe Japanese. I close the drawer, a flimsy thing, and consider a peek beneath the desktop where crude hardware and Phillips head screws have surely replaced craft. Instead, I go into the bathroom and close the door. A mirror shows my reflection, a flat imitation of a face crafted over half a century, resolved now in doubt. I stare, resisting the urge to reach into the reflection and comfort the man there, knowing I'll come up short, my hand pressed against cold glass, the distance between what I look like and what I wish terribly confirmed. Outside the bathroom door, the imitation desk, the poems I can't read, the appointment with my therapist perhaps to discuss what is and is not real.