The Thing That Plays On Insecurities.

CONTENT WARNING: TALKS ABOUT SELF-HARM AND REFERENCES SUICIDE AND DEATH OF A SIBLING.

If I am scared of one thing, it is mirrors. I hate the way they distort things and the way that they show everything you have, all of the flaws, all the imperfections and all the lies. You can’t hide when you see yourself in a mirror. You have to face yourself in full and with all the truths, despite the lies you build painstakingly to defend yourself with. And even though you try to put on a brave face and face the reflection, you can’t help finding new blemishes, new bumps, new unwanted hairs or shapes. The mirror reduces you to a mess, to nothing at all anymore. It strips you of your defenses.

It is a cruel, cruel object.

Some of you claim to like looking in the mirror, and you claim that you like what you see, but it is all a lie. It is all an idea you tried and are tired of believing.

I know what you are thinking. I was once like you, in love with what I saw in the mirror. But not any longer. I can see The Thing That Plays On Insecurities. And it is NOT pretty.

I gazed at my reflection in my full-body mirror. I was wearing my best black outfit today: a nice dark grey vest with a black dress shirt, spidery black leggings that showed off my long toned legs. I paired it with a dark Prussian blue overcoat and an inky, wispy infinity scarf wrapped around my neck twice. I had on my sharpest, sleekest black boots that had just enough wedge to them. My hair was swept, barely, into a half ponytail, some of the strawberry pink curls fell right back into my eyes. The gems on my jewelry made my orange brown eyes stand out, the pale viridian jewels caught the light of my lamp and made them shine. I applied mascara and kohl to my eyes and a shimmery gloss to my lips. The gloss was thin and wine red, but on my lips, it almost looked natural. My mother and father would never know I was wearing makeup. I spritzed myself with a perfume from Victoria’s Secret called Daydream Believer that my older sister bought for me last Christmas. My chest pinged. My sister…. Damn. I blinked back tears. I wasn’t crying. I’ll cry later at her funeral.

My father called for me from downstairs and told me to get my ass down there. I took three deep breaths, still looking in the mirror. My eyes looked red and watery, but I dabbed at them with my handkerchief, and squared my shoulders. I opened the door to my bedroom and walked down the stairs, meeting my parents at the front door. As a trio, we walked out to the car we were taking to the church for the funeral. We all climbed in the back seat and my father told the chauffeur to drive. I slouched and stared out the window, trying and failing to think of anything else but my sister. My father cuffed me on the back of my head. I yelped and my father huffed and said

“Why are you wearing your hair like that? It’s a funeral, kid, why is your hair dyed the colour of berries?” I ignored his words till my mother hissed at me to answer him.

“Because I wasn’t going to dye it black for this funeral. Bibiana would’ve liked it pink.” He huffed again.

“No one's hair should be that colour at a funeral.” I left it at that. I wasn’t going to argue with him. The car ride to the church wasn’t too long but it was long enough that I felt like the car was stifling with my father’s unsaid words to and about me.

The funeral went well. I mean, as well as any funeral would. It was the first one I had ever been at. It was an open casket, which I know that Bibiana would’ve hated. She always thought open caskets were weird and creepy. Bibiana never let anything scare her, dead things were the only things that did.

Bibiana looked still and serene. She was anything but the night she died. She was writhing in pain on her floor, screaming and crying till she got herself sick. I was in the room below hers, so I heard everything. At around three a.m, I heard her call for me. So I climbed out of bed and crept upstairs. The nurse was beside her bed, holding her hand. She looked pale and way too thin. A sheen of sweat shone on her forehead. The nurse gave me a look of pity. He stood and said that he’d be right outside Bibiana’s door if anything happened. I nodded and he left us alone.

Bibiana had wanted me to take her to her balcony. She wanted to look at the stars. I knew at that moment that Bibiana was going to die that night. I had taken her to her balcony and sat right beside her as she looked at the swirly, twinkling stars. I held her as close as I could. I had never wanted to let her go. Bibiana was my everything, my universe. How could I live without her?

Now she is a corpse in a casket. Nothing more than that.

Back at home, I sat in Bibiana’s room, looking through old photos of us. That was what all of the world was back then to me. Me and Bibiana. Bibiana and me, the sun and moon, the water and the sky, the hopeful and the hopeless. It was us against the world. She was the universe to me and now she is a corpse in the ground.

The photos made me feel like Bibiana was still there with me. A fresh round of tears stung my eyes but I wiped them away. I had sobbed at the funeral, it was time for me to be strong now. I was going to be strong and live life for the both of us. Bibiana hadn’t had enough time to be strong, she was built to be weak and she was destined to die. And as much as it hurt, I couldn’t do anything to stop that. I couldn’t change destiny. So I’ll make my destiny for both me and my older sister.

I stood in her bedroom and decided that I’ll never let her feel alone down there, six feet into the dirt. I was going to make her happy, I was going to make her smile for the rest of my life.

I never thought about how exhausting that would be. I never thought that I would want a break to not be perfect.

Bibiana loved her looks. She always made herself look her best. I think it was because she was so sick you could see it, so she wanted to hide all of that.

So I start on myself. I make myself up, I watch all the movies she would, I make sure I am a flawless mask. I cannot let Bibiana down. I have to be perfect, for both of us. My body is toned muscle, I make sure all my clothes are similar to her style and mine, a combination that looks hotter than hell. Bibiana loved ornate mirrors, so I fill my house with gilded ones. All the bathrooms, bedrooms, and anywhere else a mirror might be. It took almost all my life after Bibiana passed to get this done. It used to scare me when I’d look at myself. It was hard to look past the flaws I saw in my body to see what Bibi always told me I had ~ a beautiful body that was worthy and enough. I no longer saw the underfed child who mourned for a lost sister. I see the child who I was when I was with my sister, I was happy and carefree, nothing ever bothered me. I am back to being that same person. I feel amazing. I am healthy and in awe of myself.

The mirrors are not. The mirrors see what no one else sees. They see the cracks in the ivory mask that I hold to my face. And it scared me.

I am exhausted. I want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep forever. My makeup is smeared and ruined. I spent the evening out with my “friends” but really, I was in the bathroom at the diner, sobbing silently and trying to breathe. Bibiana never had any issues like this when she was alive, so neither should I. I looked at myself in the dingy mirror. The mirror was cracked in the bottom right corner and so I focused on the spider~webbing cracks and took a deep breath. When I looked back up at the mirror, I saw a smudge of black in the top left corner. The more I stared at it, the more it seemed to move.

“What the fuck?” The shadow grew into a vague body. I could see a head on an inhumanly long neck attached to hunched shoulders. The figure was bony and frail, its skeleton poking out at odd angles. “What is that?” A deep raspy chuckle rolled through the bathroom. The head grew a mouth full of crooked white fangs. It grinned at me, the smile cruel. Its grin grew and grew until it reached both sides of its face. I turned to look behind me, but nothing was there. When I looked back at the mirror, there it was, hunched over in the top left corner. Its formless body grew into spidery limbs and crawled around on the ceiling before it dropped right behind me. I turned to face it but it wasn’t there. But it was still there in the mirror. A shiver went down my spine. It only said one thing.

“Oh dear oh dear oh dearie meeeeee…..I sssssssee the cracksssss in your masssssk, do you? Good luck…”

Then it disappeared.

Bibiana never let things frighten her, so neither could I.

It was everywhere. Every time I looked at the mirror, it would laugh at me with that creepy, disturbing grin. And every time I tried to look it in the eyes, it would disappear like it was never there. It scared the shit out of me. But I knew that Bibiana wouldn’t let it get to her, so I can’t let it get to me.

In the morning, when I look at myself in the mirror and see the weird mirror entity, I tell it “You cannot hurt me. You aren’t even real. You cannot touch me and I will ignore you.” It just laughs at me, grins and cackles at me until I leave the mirror. It always tells me the same thing - “I can’t hurt you? I’m real, you’re ssssseeing me, are you not?” Then it shows me its biggest smile, one that splits its face in two, crawls on my ceiling and disappears. It then speaks to me in a disembodied voice. “Thisss will not lassst long, human. I know your flawssss and imperfectionsssss. I know your fear.”

“I do not have fears. You’ve got the wrong person.” It laughs once more and I don’t see it again. Not until the nighttime, when I’m peeling back my clothes and makeup to see my actual body underneath. Then it says that that is my fear. My fear is what’s under my mask. I tell it that it’s wrong but it cackles and tells me to look again. So I do but I know it’s wrong. I love what’s under my mask. I love the mask and what’s underneath it too. I made sure to live a life the way Bibiana would want. Bibiana wouldn’t want me to hate or fear what’s under my mask.

The thing in the mirror looks bigger when I see it this evening. Its limbs and neck are longer than the first time I saw it. Its grin seemed wider and its teeth sharper. I felt the need to cover my body from its view. It drops to the floor and crawls over to the mirror so we are face to face. It rests a wispy hand on its side of the mirror. Up close, it looks less bony and thin. Its body looks a little more full and filled out. When it is this close to me, I see only a grinning mouth full of fangs sharper than knives. But it’s not grinning. It has a frown on its face.

“Thissss isss the time where I ssssshow you your fear.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, backing away from the mirror. It crawls closer to its side of the mirror. “Don’t come closer to me.” It chuckles. Its hands come through the mirror and reach toward me.

“Human, do not make thissss hard. You need to ssssee your fearssss.” I close my eyes. This thing isn’t real, it’s not real, it won’t get me. I try to imagine that I don’t hear the scraping sound the thing is making as it’s coming out of the mirror. “Faccce your fear, human. Look at me.” I open my eyes.

In front of me is another person. It is me, but there are little differences. It wears the outfit I was wearing at Bibiana's funeral, but instead of a scarf, it wears a noose. Its neck is tilted at an odd angle, and I realize that its neck is broken. “What the fuck?” It advances towards me and speaks in a gurgling voice.

“Don’t do this. This is exhausting. All the makeup and clothes and jewelry and the “glamour”. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Stop!” I yell at it. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“You’ll kill yourself. All this pretend, Bibiana wouldn’t want you to harm yourself like this.”

“What are you saying?”

“Under this mask,” it glamours itself to look like me but with all the makeup that I wear. Then it starts to melt, skin peeling and falling in sludgy piles of goo. The smell of burning bodies and plastic fills my nose. The melting version of me starts to scream like it’s in pain. It is a horrible sound, and it makes my skin crawl. Once all the skin and plastic is melted off, there stands a person who looks like me: Short curly hair dyed pink and held in a tiny ponytail, its skin is the same shade as mine, caramel-y and full of acne scars, and its body is thinner than I am now. “Lies this version. Your actual body. You fear it.” I look down at my body, and notice for the first time how skinny I am, how bony I am. “You are hiding behind the idea of her. You can’t be Bibiana, you aren’t her, you can’t live in her image, this isn’t what she would want.” I didn’t understand. “Simply, Your fear is living as who you are. The fear of looking in the mirror is because you don’t like yourself. Bibiana would be sad.”

SHIT. No, she wouldn’t be sad, would she? I look at the mirror, the other version is gone and I am left with looking at myself, my true self. I notice things I’ve never seen before.

I can see my ribs and my collarbone poking out through my skin, my arms and legs are long but bony. I look sickly. I see bruises and cuts on my thighs from all the times I let things get to me, from all the times I didn’t live the way Bibiana would’ve. I haven’t cut in a while, but thinking of them hurts. My eyes flick up to my face in the mirror, noting the tracks of tears on my cheeks. My eyes look sad and lightless. I close my eyes and picture Bibiana. I recall her soft ginger hair and her sparkling deep brown eyes. Her skin was more fair than mine and she had freckles, not acne scars. She always had a rosy complexion while I never did unless I used her makeup. I miss her so much my heart hurts.

I look at myself in the mirror and I feel tears on my cheeks. Bibiana wouldn’t want me doing this to myself. In a fit of ambivalence, I kicked the mirror, knocking it over and then stomping it, not caring when the shards of glass cut my foot open and gets blood and glass everywhere.

I fucking hate mirrors.

I wake up on my sofa and look around. There is glass everywhere, the shards strewn about. The mirror over the mantle is wrecked, and the frame is on the floor. I get up and walk to my room. My full-length mirror is in pieces and the shards all have my blood on them. I head to the en suite bathroom and look in the mirror.

I no longer see the person I built myself as. I see Bibiana’s younger sibling. I see who I was at Bibi’s funeral. Sad, underfed, and lonely. The Thing That Plays On Insecurities, it told me that is my fear. It came true. I am not Bibiana’s little impersonator. I am not living for Bibi and me. There is no more Bibiana, I let things get to me and I am now what I never wanted to be.

Myself.