Electric Reflections

The couch is a faded forest green velvet, arms rolled in an imitation of an 18^th-century English antique, but it is unequivocally comfy, which is why I had hauled it atop my ancient Volkswagen Beetle after finding it abandoned on the side of the road. That couch is the second most important tool of my trade.

I sit on the couch staring at the gilded mirror, another miraculous gem saved from the curb. The gilt frame was missing chunks in several locations and had a crack vaguely in the shape of Nevada in the bottom left corner. But a mirror that had survived the trauma this one had clearly gone through had just the kind of energy I needed in my office.

I sit on the couch, staring at the mirror, losing myself into the memories of other places and other lifetimes, losing myself into a me that had long since been eroded and washed into the sea by the waves of time. I don’t do this often, confront the wounds of my youth. You know the ones I mean, the ones that still have a fresh rawness to them, despite the passage of years, the ones that will haunt our souls to the end of our days.

I sit on the couch, staring through the mirror going back in time to a me that foolishly felt old and wise at the ripe age of twenty-one. I can feel that day again, that one day in which a lightning strike shattered my world. Moving into the mirror, I can feel that day so viscerally, and, despite knowing what is to come, I wish for it to be nothing more than a strange and disturbingly vivid dream. But I know, better than anyone, that this life I’m living, this is the real life and not a dreamscape.

--

It was a hot and muggy August, full of raging thunderstorms – the kind that had always scared me as a kid but that, in my blossoming adulthood, sent electric tingles of excitement down my spine. Home for the summer, looking forward to my last year in college, I sat on the porch of my parents’ house. I have always loved sitting on that porch – curling up with a juicy book, watching the clouds morph into shapes, or catching up with passing out for an evening stroll.

That afternoon, the afternoon, a storm lurked just over the horizon. The charged air set my twenty-one-year-old mind, reminiscing about another afternoon on the porch and a very different kind of charge. Not quite four years earlier, an afternoon in late fall, when the air was crisp and dry, the sun warmed the stones of the porch, belying the approach of winter. Just shy of my seventeenth birthday, I had been steadily nurturing a crush on my neighbor, Nick, all during the summer and fall. He was out washing his car one last time before it got too cold. He loved that car – an old Charger he had fixed up with his pop. Nick was already twenty, working a steady job as an apprentice carpenter, still living with his parents, trading manual labor for room and board. That whole summer, he would take breaks with me, sitting on my porch, drinking my mom’s ice-cold homemade lemonade, and talking about everything: his car, the books I was reading to get ready for school, what I thought I’d do after graduation, the carpentry shop he was planning on building, what was going on with Miss Wallace’s yard up the street. When summer changed into fall, he’d still find reasons to be outside when I walked home from school. I had nurtured that crush but was certain that he would never see me as a woman, never reciprocate any kind of romantic affection. That fall day, I sat on the porch with some homework, my parents were out running errands, and Nick came over to sit with me after he had finished washing his car. We talked for a long while, but the sun set early, and the air became chilled. Not wanting our time together to end, I invited him in for hot apple cider. I expected him to make an excuse to go back home, so my heart seized with a quiet thrill when he smiled and accepted my invitation. I felt so domestic and grown up, that day, hosting my crush in the living room with no adult to chaperone. The moment we crossed the threshold, something changed in the air between us. It had become electrified; my senses were overloaded as if my skin knew what would happen long before my brain did. When he kissed me on my parent’s couch, half of me felt like a grown woman ready to leap into a lover’s arms, but the other half felt like a shy little girl, startled by what was happening. That inner identity crisis ultimately pushed a somewhat befuddled Nick away and shuffled him out the door with halfhearted excuses about homework and parents returning at any moment. As the door shut behind him, I reeled from the aftershocks of those few electrified minutes.

That first – that only – kiss sent ripples into my future. Four years later, on that fateful steamy August afternoon, I stared at Nick’s parents’ house across the street. He had long since moved into an apartment above his own carpentry shop. Nick and I had been distant since that kiss; the few conversations we had had were woodenly polite, intensely awkward, and mercifully short. I stared at the house, half regretting the choice my seventeen-year-old self had made, idly imagining what life might have been like had I chosen a different reaction to that kiss, wondering what I would choose if that situation came around again.

The storm broke as I mulled over the power of choice in my life. Rain began to run steadily off the edges of the roof, splattering drops across the flagstones of the porch. Thunder rolled down the street, and my eyes burned from watching the brilliant lightning streak across the sky. Standing to go inside in retreat from the storm, a prickling sensation skittered down my spine. Not a prickle of another building electrical charge, but one of awareness. I turned my head, and there he was, standing in the doorway of his parents’ house, a warm light silhouetting him. How had I missed his car parked down the street? How had I not felt his presence before this moment? He raised his hand in a half-wave, and I returned it.

Despite the pouring rain and the storm raging around us, our gazes held as he started down the steps of the house. The charge in the air was more than could be accounted for by a mere electrical storm, and my heart shifted to a swifter rhythm. A flush of hope ran across my hypersensitive skin. Would I have another choice, another chance? Could this rain wash away the regret, letting something beautiful bloom in its place?

He walked into the street, and instead of continuing across to me, he reached for the handle of his car. That hope swelled in my throat, closing off the air to my lungs and distorting into a grieving, aching mass. No, my heart cried out, no, no, come here, come to me.

I stood frozen on the porch, and Nick paused, car door ajar. As if he had heard my heart’s cry on the wind, he looked over his shoulder at me, our eyes connecting again.

A crackle of lightning flashed across the sky.

He shut the car door, turned, and started walking across the street to me, rain darkening his shirt, conforming it to the contours of his torso. Electricity sizzled, the hair on my arms standing on end. At long last, I thought, I have a chance to fix a mistake of youth.

How young I still was.

Just as I was about to step off the porch and out into the rain to meet him halfway, the prickling on my skin intensified. An unearthly feeling moved through my body, and I knew, somehow, before the blinding light struck, what was going to happen. Before I could get a warning past my lips, Nick was prone and alarmingly still in the middle of the street.

I never heard the rumble of thunder that accompanied that lightning strike. The world had gone shockingly silent in a millisecond.

Running into the street, trying to recall my high-school health class lesson on CPR and frantically trying to revive Nick, I heard a car door slam in an alternate reality.

Out of the corner of my eye, in a cracked and battered mirror, I saw the rain in Nick’s rain-soaked hair glint from the driver's seat as the dome light came on in the restored Charger. An engine rumbled to life, and an alternate Nick drove away through the rain, disappearing into the mist.

--

To know that, had Nick not chosen me that stormy day, he would have lived is a curse and, in the same turn, a gift. I hold tight to the belief that, somewhere, in an alternate universe, he is living this day, happy, successful, and with a loving family. I cling to this core belief because the only alternative self I can see is thrashing in a deep well of sorrow, regret, and self-loathing.

--

I am not your everyday fortuneteller. My office is not filled with crystal balls, tarot cards, or mystical paraphernalia. It is a simple room above an old-fashioned chemist’s shop. There is an old, threadbare, but supremely comfortable couch sitting in front of the primary tool of my trade – a mirror.

In my mirror, battered and worn by life, you will not see the future. All I can offer is a glimpse of your past and the parallel lives you are not living – the world that would, could, or perhaps even does exist had you chosen a different path.

Choices cannot be undone or remade. But, through the reflections of a mirror, we may find there is solace in alternate possibilities.