Who is he?

When I woke up this morning it was already light out. This is unusual for me but I hadn't gone to bed until ten P.M.. While I was attending to a task that most men take for granted, until the horrible moment that the task can no longer be tended to, I noticed a man in the mirror. I began to wonder "Who is he?".
He is someone I have known for a long time but never really known. He is someone I like but am not proud of and don't really admire. Over the last six years we have been constant companions and I have come to like him more. I knew him when he was young, full of the questions and doubts and misgivings of the young. I knew him through the years when he thought that all he had to do was work every day and everything would be allright. I knew him when his world fell apart, when he thought he was the lowest form of life on the planet, and I knew him when he tried to establish a new foundation on a bed of ashes, convinced that the next day held nothing but more doubts about his worth.
I see him now in a different light. He no longer thinks that he will someday become a captain of industry or a worthwhile writer. He realizes that his shoes are full of clay and his mind is full thoughts that jumble about like the colors in a kaleidoscope. In the morning light I saw that he was smiling. Smiling does not come easy to him. Others see a litany of faults when they look at him but their litany pales in comparison to the mountain of faults he has inventoried in himself.
He has spent too much time alone with me. I recently spent some time out and about in the world, meeting other people and seeing other places. I see him in a new light. The smile is justified. He is not mean, he doesn't cheat or steal, he doesn't judge. He is concerned with his own faults and not interested in the differences of others. He has come to realize that the differences of others are not faults of others, just differences.
As I stared at him I saw a transition. The wrinkles fell away, the grey became unimportant, and I saw a glimpse of the boy he once was. The shy, smiling, boy that was so wracked with self doubt and misgivings and wanted so desperately to be accepted by his peers. The boy that tried to do what others did, think what others thought, and have what others had. In his Father's yearbook it says "He has not found his peer.". It would be a fitting epitaph for the man in the mirror. It does not mean that he has not found someone that measures up to the grandeur of himself, it just means that he has not found someone that is the same as him.
I would be proud to be that peer for him. He looks out from the mirror and smiles at me for he knows what I have become and he knows the boy I was. We both have learned what happens while you are making other plans. He is good company and maybe that is all that is necessary in life, good company no matter how strange. Good company, not good company as others would define it and not yourself as others would define you but good company as you would define it and yourself as you define yourself.
By the way, he has finally been able to grow a moustache to be proud of. He has finally found a friend to be proud of, peering into the mirror.