Time to Reflect

I never told the woman behind the register that I couldn’t see my reflection in this mirror. I just placed it on the counter as fast as I could without dropping it and stuffed my hands back into my coat pockets. If she had seen how they were trembling, she would have asked questions. And I had no desire to answer them.

“Why I never thought I’d live to see the day,” the woman said, as she searched the mirror for the price tag. She lifted the mirror up between us and looked directly into it, admiring both her elderly reflection and the craftsmanship that must have gone into making the wooden frame. “Such a beautiful piece to have been here for so long. I thought it would have sold years ago. It must have been waiting for you to find it.”

She turned the mirror away to smile at me and I did my best to return the gesture but it was useless. My eyes darted down to the mirror and then right back up to meet hers again.

“It’s on the back,” I told her through gritted teeth. I saw her face change and the smile subside. Her eyes squinted in my direction and I could tell she recognized me. “The price tag. It’s on the back of the mirror. Look, you can see it right there.” I pulled my hand out of my pocket to point to the sticker and returned it just as quick. 

The woman flipped the mirror around and I did my best to pretend I saw myself in the reflection. Without saying a word, she punched the price into the cash register. This antique store insisted on cash and the women behind the counter took pride in their ability to count back change. 

“And five is ten and ten is twenty…” they would say, while my friends raised on debit and credit cards watched in wonder as the correct change landed back in our hands. It was a neat little trick, but I had no time for it right now. The price appeared at the top of the register and I handed the old woman all my cash and told her to keep the change as I grabbed the mirror and ran for the exit as fast as I could.

The woman leapt over the counter and chased me to the shop door. Before I crossed the doorway to the parking lot, I foolishly turned around. She stood directly behind me, her face frozen as she stared deep into my eyes. Try as I might, I could not take another step.

“I told you what would happen,” she said. “It was your choice not to listen.” She leaned in closer until her nose nearly touched my own. Her eyes went dark and I could feel the heat of her breath as she whispered to me. 

“Lose yourself inside the mirror and all you love will disappear.” 

Her lip turned up into the slightest smile and I could feel my body again. I dashed out of the store, tossed the antique mirror onto the passenger seat of my Volkswagen Rabbit, and tried to catch my breath. The mirror caught the late afternoon sun and the reflection burned my eyes before I could turn away. I reached into the back seat to grab an old wool sweater I found at that same shop a few weeks earlier and threw it over the mirror. The glare subsided and I stared straight ahead as I turned the key to start my car. I put it into reverse and started to back up when a loud horn startled me from my stupor. My heart started racing as I raised my hand to apologize to the driver behind me.

I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror, doing the best I could to aim it away from me while still being able to see out of the back window. But I needed to know. Putting it off would not change the outcome. Only the time left until it arrived.

I grabbed the rearview mirror, aimed it towards the drivers seat and looked up. My reflection stared back at me. Like it had done every day of the past ten years since I had learned to drive. I was still here for the moment; able to see myself in both the rearview mirror and the antique store window in front of the car. The woman was back behind the counter, smiling politely to another customer as she rang up her items on the cash register. 

I kicked in the clutch and slammed the car into reverse, backing out of the parking lot and onto the main avenue that led to my downtown apartment; a tiny upstairs unit in a rent-controlled brownstone I found on Craigslist during college. The driver’s window has been stuck halfway down since I broke the handle last month and the cold air would have been too much to handle were it not for the vintage pea coat I had found at that antique store during my previous visit. Between that and the polyester blouse I threw on earlier, I could at least stay warm enough to focus on the road.  

I pulled up next my apartment at dusk. The car hopped the curb but I left it there. It was unlikely to make a difference anyhow. Tossing the old wool sweater into the back seat again, I grabbed the mirror from the passenger seat and held it tight as I burst through the building entrance and ran up the stairs into my apartment. 

I always kept the door unlocked because what use to a burglar is an apartment full of second-hand furniture, vintage decor, thrifted clothing, and antique mirrors. Maybe some of it was actually worth something, but I never bothered to check. Price was never the point. It was always about capturing a vibe and indulging my lifelong desire to live in a bygone era that ended long before I was born. The past. When everything seemed cooler and easier. And infinitely better. It’s where I truly belonged. I’d always been sure of it. It’s what kept me wandering through antique stores in what had become a weekend ritual. Finding pieces of the past that fit on my body or throughout my apartment. Catching my reflection at every turn in the mirrors I placed on every wall in every room. I was starting to think I probably spent more time looking in the mirror than I did doing most anything else. 

The sun had nearly set by the time I reached my tiny entryway. I caught a glimpse of my fading reflection in the hall mirrors as I ran into the living room and threw my new antique mirror onto the old rug in the middle of the floor. I leaned over and looked directly into it, but the only thing I saw in the reflection was the ceiling above me. Tears filled my eyes and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. Maybe if I destroyed this mirror, I could stop what was about to become of me. I ran to the Victorian desk in the corner of the room and grabbed a handmade brass paperweight that seemed heavy enough to do the job. But when I turned back around, my body froze and the paperweight fell to the floor.

The woman from behind the store counter stood over the antique mirror. The reflection from the single light left on in the room illuminated her face from below as she curled her lip at me. 

“It’s far too late for such wishful thinking,” she said, as the sun fell behind the buildings outside and darkness set in for the night. “Night has fallen. Soon your reflection will look the same in all mirrors as it does in this one here.”

I bent down and picked up the brass paperweight. Lifting it high above my head, I ran to the middle of the room and fell to the feet of the woman, smashing the mirror with all I had left and praying that it would make a difference.

I could hear the woman begin to laugh while mumbling something under her breath. I wiped the tears from my eyes and looked up at her elderly face grimacing down at me, her chanting becoming louder with each refrain.

“And five is ten and ten is twenty. This life ahead is your only money. But lose yourself inside the mirror and all you love will disappear.”

The full-length antique mirror I had once purchased from the store rested against the wall and faced the center of room. I should have been able to see my reflection next to the shattered mirror, but it was nowhere to be found.

I lifted myself up off the floor as the woman from behind the counter continued to chant. The single light that remained was enough to see the dozens of antique mirrors I had placed on each of the walls throughout my apartment. To see myself at all times from every angle. To adore the vintage outfits I found every weekend and to admire the way I looked in an apartment full of antiques from forgotten times. 

Only now, my reflection was gone. In every one of the mirrors, no matter where I turned to look, the face that should have been staring back at me was no more. I turned to the woman standing in front of me.

“All I ever wanted was a chance to live back then,” I explained through my tears. “If I could have just been alive all those years ago, life would be so much easier. I would have looked even prettier in those clothes. Everyone would have loved me. I wouldn’t have to work so hard. You all had it so easy in the past.”

“You foolish, foolish child. What I wouldn’t give.” the woman said in disgust just above her breath. The darkness settled in on her elderly face and any semblance of youth she had tried to maintain had vanished completely. “You had your whole life to live and you chose to only look backwards. To lament over what might have been in an era long gone and never what could have actually been in the long time you had left. You obsess over yourself in this tiny apartment with no intention of making the slightest difference to anything outside of it. Or anything outside of yourself.”

“You don’t know me,” I replied through a quivering lip as I felt my knees getting weaker. “You wouldn’t know the first thing about what goes through my mind.”

“I watch you every weekend," she told me. "Wandering aimlessly through my store. Standing in front of every mirror you find and admiring yourself, posing in these vintage outfits from my own childhood, trying to recreate some impression you have of a past that only exists in your mind. Consumed not with the mirror itself, but with the reflection you see in it.”  

My knees buckled and I fell back to the floor, my bare hands landing on the shards of mirror. 

“You had so much time left in this world, while my friends and I have so little. And you chose to waste it, wishing you could be old like us. All the while having no idea the lengths we would go just to be given another month or two.” Her lip once again turned up in the slightest smile and she bent down towards me, her face nearly touching my own. I could feel the heat of her breath. “Though in the case of someone as young as you, I may have just granted myself another couple of years.”  

The woman behind the counter stood up and straightened her shirt before turning to walk towards the door. As she passed through the living room, I could see her elderly reflection moving across each of the mirrors on my walls above me. Unless my eyes and the darkness were fooling me, she appeared a little younger once she reached the front door. 

I used the last of my strength to call to her before she walked out. “I never wanted to be old like you! I just wanted to live in the past.”

“A foolish mistake that can only be made by the young,” she said, as she pushed the door just far enough away to for me to see her smile. “You cannot live in the past, my dear. The past is dead.”

And by the time dawn comes back around, I shall be, too.