The bathroom wall looked great

A lick of fresh paint was all it needed

Until I installed new mirrors with LED backlighting

The light shot across the wall

It was brazenly honest and totally unforgiving

Illuminating every minor imperfection on the surface

Casting infinitely long shadows

The wall resembled a NASA lunar landing map

I considered smoothing it all out

Filling in all the deep craters and scratches

Sanding down all the lumps and bumps

But that would make a huge mess

The backlights would still magnify all remaining imperfections

So I decided to tile the wall

I thought it would only take one day

I soon learned that the wall was not just bumpy

None of the corners were square

The edges were neither straight nor level

I had to make a lot more tile cuts than envisaged

After three days it is almost done

The lunar landing map is now in a time capsule

Hidden behind an array of odd shaped tiles

I wondered why I had not seen the real state of the wall before

Then I realized what was happening

You can look at something a thousand times

You can be totally convinced that you know everything about it

But you never really see anything completely

Until you are forced to look at it in a different way