Green Walls

Kelsey stood staring blankly at the mirror in front of her. “What in the world just happened?” she thought, as her mind tried to connect back to reality. “Am I on something?” She tried to lift her foot to take a step toward the door but it felt like someone was holding it down. With a huge effort she pulled up one foot and moved it closer. Her head was spinning, eyes moving in and out of focus as she fell to her hands and knees and crawled out into the dark hallway. Once there, she sat down leaning against the wall and began taking deep breaths to try to calm herself. Her chest heaved as she wiped the cold sweat from her face with the sleeve of her dark red hoodie.

Whatever it was that had happened to her was the strangest thing she had experienced. It felt like a trance, or maybe it could better be described as an extremely vivid dream. It had stirred her emotions, jarred her senses and frightened her more than she could explain.

  She had been in her room just after getting home from her job at the grocery store. She hated to work there but needed the money for the few small bills that she was responsible for while living with her mother.

  She and her mother had a very strained relationship. Kelsey had always felt judged by her ever since her father died. Her mother had tried to reach out to her at times but Kelsey resented it and the attempts always ended in a confrontation. 

  She avoided conversation with her mother at all cost and this is why every day she went to her room immediately after her shift.  It felt like her room was her safe haven. The one thing she felt that she truly deserved to have all to herself. She had spent hours poring through magazines to pick the style of decor that she wanted, settling on an eclectic look. 

   By frequently shopping at antique and thrift stores, she found items that fit her style while staying within her small budget. No one else had ever seen her room besides her mother a couple of times, but Kelsey didn’t care. She had built this small world to be alone and inviting other’s company would ruin the environment of peace she had created.

  She was very proud of her latest find at the antique shop. A beautiful, large mirror that she had placed on her dresser. It had a thin, white wooden frame with flowers carved into it. The main reason she had bought the mirror was simply because of its size. She could see herself clearly even from the opposite side of the room. 

  There were two unusual things about the mirror. On the slightly peeling, brown paper back there was a strange inscription that was written in a language that Kelsey did not recognize. The singular line went across the top of the back part of the mirror and also down the sides and across again at the bottom. Since the back of the mirror would never be seen she did not mind this much, but it made her feel slightly uneasy. 

  The other strange part of the mirror was that in the wooden carving at the bottom, hidden amongst the flowers, there was a face carved into the wood. The man, or maybe it was a woman, had a solemn, sad expression covering his or her face. Kelsey would have never noticed the face if she hadn’t placed the mirror into her car with the bottom part of the frame pointing out. Despite these oddities, the mirror blended in beautifully with her room and she had been pleased with its presence. 

Until tonight.

Kelsey had been over on the far side of the room sitting in her large reclining chair. She had glanced up at her beautiful mirror and was surprised that the reflection did not seem quite right. 

“It must be an imperfection in the glass,” she thought as she looked back down at her cell phone. But upon looking back up it seemed that the imperfection had morphed her face into something she recognized, although faintly. She gazed more intently, her spine tingled and her hair stood up on end as she saw the face in the reflection turn and gaze over to the left all on its own. It began moving its mouth as if it was speaking to someone. 

Kelsey slowly leaned forward in her chair. She really didn’t want to get closer to whatever that thing was in the mirror but she also was terrified of just sitting still and not knowing what exactly she was looking at. She blinked a couple of times and pushed herself out of the chair with a loud creak. The reflection did not seem to notice but kept looking to the left and occasionally moving its mouth. 

  As she inched closer to the mirror she recognized what she was seeing. It was an image of herself, although much younger than she was now. She still had the same long, dark hair although she had styled it differently back then, preferring a single braid as a practical and natural look. 

  The face in the reflection had a tear-stained appearance and as Kelsey drew closer the background began to slowly come into view. As the scene before her became clear, she started and drew back. It was as if she had been given a vivid glimpse into her worst memory.

The background of the scene was the rear of an ambulance with the doors open. The image of herself was sitting on the bumper speaking with a police officer, her face twisted into a painful expression. An occasional flash of blue or red light shone across both of them. The officer was attempting to be understanding through her sobbing breakdowns as she tried to answer his questions.

   Kelsey drew closer and closer to the mirror as if drawn by an unexplainable force. Before she could stop herself she was leaning forward over the top of the dresser. The frame of the mirror slowly dissolved from her view and she could actually begin to hear the younger Kelsey speaking. When she turned back towards the room she swallowed hard, because all she could see were police cars lined up on the side of the street and the horrible sight of the twisted remains of her father’s SUV. 

  This nightmare had now enveloped her. She forgot about the mirror. She forgot about the time difference between this event and her current life. It felt as if this event was actually happening all over again. Except this time she was seeing it in third person. 

  She absorbed the sights and sounds of that terrible night as they cut into her deeply. Her wound had been reopened yet again, as it had every day since the accident. However, the stunning realness of this time was too much to bear.

“If only I hadn’t told him to go out tonight.” She could hear her young, shaking voice say from the ambulance. 

   Kelsey closed her eyes in an attempt to block out the vision and collapsed into a heap on the grass next to the ambulance. Tears flowed. Everything went black. 

   When she began to look around again everything was clouded as if it had not yet come into focus. The scene had changed, she was now back in her home. But judging by the decor and the ugly green on the living room wall, she could tell that she must be experiencing something that happened almost 10 years ago. Probably near the time of the accident, she thought. 

  Kelsey turned and went towards her bedroom. She opened the door and once again saw her younger self inside. Her image was lying on the bed listening to an old portable CD player and halfway doing her homework. Kelsey turned and looked around the room slowly. She had made a lot of progress on this space since back then. The old posters were still hanging and the silly, pink plush chair was in the corner of the room. She had gotten rid of these items very early in her room makeover which came a year or two later. 

  But despite seeing all the changes in the room, Kelsey thought that her own self really had not changed much from that night years ago. Her overwhelming guilt was still present. Before the accident she was so full of life, energized by learning and passionate about so many interests. But since that time she had given up on her performance in school or pursuit of any sort of career.

   How could she continue on as if nothing had happened? Especially when she was the one who had convinced her dad to go out with her on that cold winter night. And to make everything worse, her mother seemed to add to the guilt by her silence directly after the accident. It was true that her mother was never one who was great at communicating her feelings, but in this time of her greatest grief Kelsey had felt abandoned and cut off from the only person who could help her heal and rebuild her life. 

   Kelsey saw her younger self begin to shift on the bed, taking off the bulky headphones and heading towards the door. She had the grim realization that this was the night that she and her mother had one of the first of many battles over her choice to not pursue her education. 

  Kelsey followed the image out of the bedroom, through the hallway and out toward the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by piles and piles of papers. They were covering the table, a couple of stacks lay on both chairs beside her mother’s seat and a few more papers lay on the floor as well. It dawned on Kelsey that this was likely all of the financial records and paperwork her mother was left with after her father’s death. Back at that time she didn’t comprehend all that must have had to be done. Bills, letters, insurance, everything had to be changed and paid out of a single income. 

   Her image of herself walked right by the table without a glance and opened the fridge, looking for a snack or drink. Her mother looked up towards the figure at the fridge and started to speak a couple of times, then hesitated and looked back down at the papers silently. 

   Eventually her mother made a remark about her grades at school, which turned into a heated conversation about whether Kelsey would continue her dream of going to college. Everything built up so fast. The image of herself continued to argue with her mother, volume rising and tension building with each sentence. This went on for half an hour at least and finally her younger self walked briskly away and back to her room.

Kelsey still stood in the kitchen after seeing herself leave. She had gained a new perspective of her mother. The amount of stress she was under must have been overwhelming. But she was still insistent that Kelsey go to college even though the funds were not likely to be enough. 

  Her mother was now at the table with her head in her hands, crying softly. Kelsey was surprised as she had rarely seen her show emotion especially after the death of her father. Her mother gathered up a few of the papers and brought them to the living room, sitting down on the couch and looking through them without really seeming to focus on what they contained. 

  Judging by the old clock on the living room shelf it was now almost midnight. Kelsey walked over and glanced through the hallway to see that her bedroom door was closed and likely locked. Her mother finally put the papers down on the armrest of the couch and stood up.

  Then she did something that Kelsey thought was unimaginable. She walked into the short hallway to the locked bedroom door and stood there facing it for a moment, staring at nothing. Then she turned away from the door, leaned against it and slid down into a seated position with her eyes closed. 

  Time passed slowly now. Kelsey walked into the hallway and knelt down beside her mother. The expression on her mother’s face was one of sadness but also compassion for her daughter behind the locked door. As the hours passed, her mother did not move from this spot, which gave Kelsey a long time to think through what she had just seen.

She slowly began to comprehend what had been in front of her the whole time, but she was unable to see before. Her view of her mother was warped, like the reflection she had seen in the mirror earlier that night. Every time she looked at her mother she could only see a reflection of her own false guilt and shame of the accident, feeling sure that her own feelings were mirrored in her mother. Now it became clear that this was false. Her mother did truly care for her, even though she had difficulty expressing that love at times. 

  Understanding this for the first time caused Kelsey to be overcome with emotion as she stepped close to her mother’s image and slid down the wall beside the doorway. Everything had changed in knowing that there was someone who understood her pain and sympathized with it. As she sat in the dark stillness, she determined that she would take this knowledge and try to rebuild her fractured relationship with the one person who could help her to heal these old but deep wounds. 

  Closing her eyes while sitting in the hallway, Kelsey suddenly felt a shift in her awareness of her surroundings. Her eyelids fluttered open and she was back in her room, staring at her completely accurate reflection in the mirror. Feeling dazed and slightly nauseous, she fumbled her way to the door, unlocking and opening it to see if the image of her mother was still present but it was now gone. 

   Collapsing to her knees, she crawled over to the spot where she and her mother had sat and shifted her body to lean against the doorframe while breathing hard from the shock of what had happened. Looking down the hall into the living room, she saw with relief that the walls were now beige instead of green.