Reason

This is why I always stay home. Everyone wants to know why I don’t go out anymore and this is it. This is why I’m a homebody, this is the reason. I can hear that clip of Cardi B from that Love & Hip Hop reunion show or whatever, where she’s screaming “WHAT WAS THE REASON?!”. This is the reason.

Every time I go out with them, some kind of crazy shit happens. They always want to do something extra. Something “exciting” or “scary”. Truth be told, I don’t want to do anything exciting or scary. I want to be in my pajamas on the couch, watching someone else do something exciting or scary, on Netflix. Or Hulu or whatever the hell I pick that night. I just don’t want to be here, doing this. It’s October and that means pumpkin spice, apple picking, flannels, Halloween, watching Hocus Pocus twenty times, and the list goes on. Which is exactly how I wound up in the backseat of a red paint-peeled 2004 Camry on my way to the number one haunted attraction on the east coast. How I wound up circling through an actual house of mirrors, searching for my very excited and very scared friends.

 Bitches.

I turn the corner again and there’s only more mirrors and more corners. I swear I’m actually starting to get dizzy. The hallways are tight, with just enough space to lift your arms out and touch the blurred reflection of your own fingertips. The glass is as cool as steel and coruscates the light illuminating from the small circular LEDs which have been strategically placed every three feet in the low ceiling. They’re the only source of light and they’re dim. Just enough to see but leaving a closet size space of pure darkness between them. My hands are sweating so much I’m leaving full hand prints on the mirrors while trying to keep my balance but to be honest, it’s freezing in here. My mouth is dry in the way that I can taste my own saliva and everytime I catch a glimpse of my own gaze, it takes me a second to realize who I’m looking at.

 In what I can only assume must be a very distant hallway, I can hear people talking and laughing and this makes my blood boil. Where are they?

Determined to find my friends, I shake off the confusion and take a couple steps but I’m abruptly face to face with myself. My jagged breath fogs the mirror in front me. Now, all I can hear is my own chest rising and falling. My breathing accelerates and this sends a prickly feeling of electricity up both of my arms. I don’t recognize the green of my eyes or the reason my eyelashes are wet. Am I crying? I’m at a fork. I look right and then snap my neck and look to the left. I look back behind my shoulder into a straight hallway of mirror and try to figure out how I didn’t see this fork coming up but I can’t make sense of it. Worse than that, it’s unnaturally silent. The kind of silence that your brain interprets as a high pitched tone and pushes any normal human being to put on music or turn on the news. Any kind of background noise to eliminate your own intrusive thoughts.

That’s when the silence is split. The sound crawls into my ear canal as if on eight legs.  The sound echoes in my ear drum like a deafening scream but it’s not deafening at all. In fact, it’s so quiet, so subtle, like the sound ice makes when it’s too thin and you’ve taken a step too far. A slow, soft, creeping cracking sound. A mirror begins to crack, and then shatters into pieces that hit the floor like church bells, sounding off in accordance with their varying sizes. I can’t find the mirror at first but oddly enough I can feel my frozen mind thaw with the warm breeze of relief. A broken mirror means a way out. Right?

 I turn and I turn and I turn. Where is it? I can’t find it. I race to the end of the hallway, back the way I came. Nothing. I turn and I turn, nothing. Everywhere I turn I see me. My face. I walk up to the distorted reflection directly in front of me. Only it isn’t distorted at all. It’s the clearest I’ve ever seen myself. 

My eyes flit from the top of my frizzy brown hairline, across the stitching of my jeans and down to the white toe of my chucks. Searching for any hints that this really is me I’m looking at because it doesn’t look like me. All the while, my breathing is so loud. So fast it’s ripping through my throat and I bet I couldn’t scream even if I wanted to. Then the edges of my lips- of the lips reflecting back at me- curl at the edges. I stop breathing and the silence is back. I’m smiling but I know I’m not actually smiling. I don’t feel that smile on my own lips. It’s widening right before my eyes and when I look into the eyes they’re not smiling at all. They’re angry, they’re viciously furious and in a split second the whole expression alters into something totally different. 

I turn around and fall on my butt, my face pressed against my arms which I’ve crossed across my knees. That’s when I hear sobbing. That’s right, I can hear her crying. First gently and then hyperventilating. I look up, and my reflection has followed me, vividly in the mirror across this small hallway. Once again, I’m face to face with myself. Tears pouring from eyes that look like mine and pooling above a lip curved like my own. Her eyebrows are furled against an expression crossed between fury and absolute terror. The prickly redness of her cheeks emanates heat and even the imitation of sadness running down her face doesn’t seem to cool it off. I feel my brain start to freeze all over again and my chest is locked into place as if I’ve fallen through the ice and into the dark depths of water beneath. Her eyes are level with mine and even though they seem to be mine, they’re not. And that’s when she starts screaming. Screaming so loud it sends shockwaves through my spine and slaps my consciousness back into reality, leaving me questioning everything in front of me but my worst fears are confirmed by the spit landing in freckles all around my face. This is real. 

The smell of her breath is putrid and her scream splinters through my bones harshly enough that I can hear them crack and break. Only it isn’t my bones, it’s the mirrors all around us. As she leans in, her nose only centimeters from mine, the mirrors surrounding us crash into ashes that float along the stale air. I’m lost in the eyes of my desperate doppelganger and just before we collide into each other, my mind breaks free and I can think. My brain tells my legs to move, allowing me to scramble across a floor dirtied by the feet of teenagers, who had unknowingly created core memories in the same place I’ve lost my mind. My elbows dig into the particle board floor and I invite these new splinters under my skin as I try to scratch my way to safety until an intangible grip closes around my ankle. I’m torn across the plywood and thrown from glass wall to glass wall like a ping pong ball but I can’t even hear the glass breaking over the ear-splitting scream that engulfs this dingy hallway, in this endless house of mirrors. Eyes that look just like my own, glare into me from a position-I’m slowly realizing- standing directly over my pathetically strewn body. Her tears leak onto my face and for the first time I feel real fear building in my heart. I think my adrenaline must have been protecting my sanity from the realness of my situation and for the first time I’m truly terrified. This isn’t me. I’m not here looking back at myself. I don’t know who this is. I’m drenched with tears and sweat and my ankle is swollen under the weight of her grip and just when I decide prayer must be the only way out of this, her free hand lifts an elegantly sharp shard of glass between our two noses.

My eyes widen in the reflection of the shard of glass but they don’t move at all in the reflection behind it. I can hear my heartbeat in my skull, making my headache and my hands seem to be pinned to the floor purely out of fear. She turns the sharpest point of the glass shard towards my pupil and laughter fills the hallway around us. She laughs so hard, I can feel it vibrate the atmosphere and echo through the dimensions existing only within the mirrors. My body shakes with her cackling, trembling from the force behind her hiccuping diaphragm. I’ve blocked all of this out and I’m going cross eyed as I peer into the blade of glass that is just a chortle away from making me blind. But instead my alter rips away from me and spears the sliver of mirror, intended to take my eyesight, into her own neck, and slashes at the skin without even the slightest change of expression. Her laughing turns to choking and her choking turns to gagging and the sound of flesh tearing is burning itself into a lasting memory in my brain. Blood spills all over me, over my face, my chest, my arms, I’m swimming in it. My mouth fills with the taste of copper and now I truly am blind. In my mind I’m flailing in some sort of retreat, trying my hardest to escape the blood coughing all over me from the mouth of some demented version of myself. I’m thrashing against the hot liquid pooling around me and I do my best to imagine myself back home. 

In the lake. Backstroke. I can feel the warm breeze again but the air is cool. Cooler than the water. Backstroke. I think it must be over. 

Backstroke. I kick my feet lightly, I don’t want to scare the fish. Backstroke. When I open my eyes, the sky's the only source of light and it’s dim. It must be dusk. Backstroke. The clouds are moving away from me and it’s naturally silent in the way that water fills the empty space in your ear canal. Backstroke. Everyone wants to know why I don’t go out anymore. This is it. This is the reason. Backstroke. The water rushes over me and I feel so safe, I would question nothing. Especially not my own reflection. Backstroke.