Mirror, Mirror

The mirror is a gateway to the unseen.

I stand against my will. The chill within the room is the heat pressing into the darker depths of insanity. The loss isn’t loss. It is merely acceptance. I can’t accept it. I just can’t. I won’t be like them.

The wooden floor is covered with a fog swimming around me, the gentle guilt breezing through my still fingers without a thought. Ice stills around my feet; up, swirling, twisting around my legs, freezing my skin to death.

The shelves are dusty, the books scattered around my boots. The torn spines, the bruised letters, the ripped pages of words. The fires glaring, but not destroying, dancing across stories. Indestructible. Irreplaceable. The ugly. The me.

My scream is gone.

I stare at my broken reflection. I don’t even bother with a painted face.

The wooden boards are shifting, and soak up emotions burning with hate. The ice melts, but I can’t move.

Dead eyes, less than blue, lighter than black, more than gray, but empty all the same. Hands at my sides, lifeless, don’t pulse. My chest slows. Puffs of breath catch my eyes. There is an escape after all. I watch the mirror, the room of hate and pain in words and screams pushing in on me.

To end it all would be heavenly.

In its place, is darkness. Pure darkness, with the exception of the mirror, still the same distance, still close, still unreachable. I can’t see myself.

If I don’t exist, what is pain?

Instead, I am only a shadow. A fuzzy haze. Still something. Still in pain.

Beyond…

There isn’t a glass mirror, but an antique window of bumps and warped images.

The soft pink, the darker blues. The colors of the loss.

A turn of the head, the eyes blurred through the imprisoning mirror. Dark ropes of impenetrable strength hold me, squeezing me every time I look harder. But I cannot stop hoping. I wish the light of a smile could rise on my face, but in the mirror, there’s only the hazy line of my mouth, sealed in secrets.

But in the mirror, there it is. My soul fights the restraints, my body frozen still. I hear the snaps of the binding on my arms and legs, leaving red rope burns and blistering bruises on my skin. The pain makes me cry out, but I must be silent or I might awaken the beast.

My hands free, I must get to her.

With all my force, I lunge at the mirror, the glass as hot as when it was formed. My shoulder slams into it. I hear the glass shatter in a satisfying clatter. The pieces fall below my feet, tumbling into the abyss of anger.

A movement of pink fabric and dark blue overalls darts across my vision. I open my mouth, willing my voice to scream, but it catches. A cancerous lump of insufferable poison boils up in my throat, a porcupine of fear and longing.

There is a name, but I can’t remember. The soft pink bound book mingling in flames; my only recollection. For now, she is only a being, a nameless face. A clay imprint of faded memory on my consciousness.

I chase after her, the dark walls crisscrossing with an old field. The evening seems to be fading, the stars rising higher every second. The blades of grass brush against my running legs, and fireflies rise up as stars in fright. The tunnel seems to swallow the space.

She is ahead of me, but I reach out, and I catch a fistful of wispy hair in my shaking hand. Anger fills me. I want to scream and shout, but my teeth are sewed shut.

She whips around, her face still a haze. I can’t stop myself before I feel my fist clench up, my nails digging into my skin, and it flies into her jaw, impacting with a hard, silent cry. She doesn’t scream, but I want to. I can’t open my lips, but metallic tastes flood my mouth, choking me.

I can’t say I’m sorry yet.

It feels so wrong. I can’t stop reliving the moment where my fist made contact with her frozen jaw.

I still can’t accept my faults. It’s her’s. She caused me suffering; what is mercy to punishment in the face of flaming anger.

Her face is still blurred, but so is everything else; tears are building Towers of Babels in my eyes. Hurt immediately fills the air.

My soul twines itself to my own guilt and her pain. Her hand reaches for mine, but the tar, it’s dragging me under. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. Just one more breath? What is this dream?

No, I’m past feeling. I let go of her hair and shove her shoulders away from me, and she slams into the cave wall, curling onto the ground, holding her head in her hands. Her head turned towards me, and even if I can’t see it, I feel it, the drowning of sadness, the broken of string.

The hurt.

For a moment, I feel it, the freeing hatred, not from her, but from my own curled fingers.

The moment I jump off the diving board, I fly for a moment, weightless, but the water isn’t there, the concrete is too close, I can’t let go, but dark is releasing.

The concrete brushes against my skin, burning me, I feel the sickening lurch in my stomach, the horrid of my rage.

But it is her fault. My pain is. Because she left. Because she is gone.

I hit the concrete, but death is too merciful. My eyes burst open, and pain crawled like lightning across every fiber of my heart.

We are in a hallway, tiled ice below me. Above, fires are lights too close to my eyes. Next to me, she is no longer there. I turn around. I hate her. After all that she’s done. She made me drown in all of this pain. She’s the reason that there isn’t any escape.

Laughter like scraping metal on a chalkboard surrounds me. From within the walls, dark, hazy creatures emerge. They are clothed in dark hoods and whispers that sound like the viper’s hissing fill my ears. They crowd around me and my thoughts, frozen fingers on my shoulders ushering me forward down a staircase.

Darkness fills my peripheral vision. I feel mud smearing on my clothes as I step down even lower. There are thousands, and one grabs my shoulder, and thrusts me into the floor, ice touching my skin.

I miss a step, and I tumble into a sea of mud and bones, wispy tentacles of a gaseous substance of a rancid smell swirling around me.

The creatures float down to me, hovering over the mud in dark cloaks the color of a starless midnight.

A raspy hiss comes from one.

For once a sudden fear fills me. I can’t stay here. The thought consumes my brain and I push against the restraints in my voice, pushing the stone up the hill. I know it should be futile, but I must keep pushing. I thrust my anger at the boulder instead of my wavering resilience in a moment of weak reliance, and the stone tumbles down the hill.

Hisses of raspy, quiet laughter rise up around me.

I try to block them out and push harder, when she catches my thoughts. Her innocence makes me rethink what I did. I try to push the rock harder, but that causes more of her to show up.

Her pink shirt and blue overalls, her blurred face, her half completed part. Her lack of the physical, the moment she left. The day she caused the world to fall on top of me.

I can’t let the boulder go, but fire seems to be exploding within my bones.

Using all my force, I push the boulder and it rolls down the other side of the grassy hill, just as I spot the sun poking above the horizon. I stand in its radiance fulfilled until I am pulled back on a leash and collar. The creatures are what my eyes see, but she is what I see.

I growl, but my mouth is still sealed shut. Still, I notice that some of the strange hissing has stopped. As if they feared my voice. I pull at the strings around my lips, but pain fills my mouth, accompanied by the metallic taste I’ve tasted before.

One of the creatures swoops down and I feel a blow to my jaw, just like I did to her. Still, I have to try. I fumble around the leather string, and I find the knot at the side of my mouth and slowly untangle it, every shaky jerk I pull the knot, twisting it, unwinding it, tears rising in my eyes. Finally, the knot is no more, leaving the curled, thick string behind. I painstakingly pull the string, undoing the sewing on my lips.

Now the creatures are beginning to appear panicky, bouncing from one foot to the next, hissing louder, and some not at all.

I stand up, and they take a step back.

I close my eyes and when I open them, I’m in the room from earlier again, and fallen leaves and dust swirl around in circles on the wooden floor.

Everything is where it had been, except for the mirror.

Pink grazes the corner of my vision.

It’s her. I spin around, and she stands a meter from me in the middle of two rows of dusty selves, The distant and unearthly dim light illuminating the dust in the air, making her look like she is sprinkled in glitter. She stands as still as a museum statue.

‘Is she a statue?’ My mind ponders.

She is close, but unreachable. Something is different about her now. I recognize it. She is blindfolded with a blue statin blindfold. At first my mind darts immediately to the dark creatures hissing in the back of my mind, who had just attacked me.

Then my fist twitches and I remember it colliding with her jaw.

Am I the reason?

With my voice now free, I muster the first words I’ve said in eternity. They rasp on my chest. “Why do you wear the blindfold?”

She responds quickly, mirroring my tone. “Why do you wear the blindfold?” Only her mouth moves while talking.

I have no blindfold- do I? I remember her blurred face. Why was the blindfold on hers? “Where is the blindfold?” I muster, my throat dry.

“On your heart.” My hands instinctively touch my chest. Then before I know what I’m doing, my feet are walking towards her.

Like a frightened deer, she backs away robotically, arguing in a placid voice, “You can’t touch this.” Referring to the blindfold.

Then under her breath, “Not yet,”

I cock my head at her, a mix of emotions swarming in my brain. “Why?” I ask, broken. “Is it because I hit you?” She doesn’t say anything.

“Look, I’m sorry. I have these emotions and I can’t-” I begin, but I stop, noticing her twitch violently, “Are you okay?”

Her voice sounds like she is being choked. “Excuses…” Then she returns to the soldier pose she was just in.

I feel my body tense. “I’m… sorry…” She looks the same. Confusion wraps around me like a thick blanket.

“For this.” I lunge for her and my fingers brush against the blindfold. My fingers go numb. An angry growl emitted from her.

I shove her against the wooden wall behind her, and grip the fabric in my hands. I feel my arm tense and my bones turning to ice. My hand adjusts to pull off the rest of the blindfold, and a stab of heat spreads throughout my hand. Tears well up in my eyes.

Still, I continue to pry off the satin resistant blindfold off her eyes.

She lets out a soft cry and finally, the blindfold comes off.

I try to see her eyes, but a dark mist that makes my skin blister when it touches me spills out of her. I back up as the mist forms into a humanoid creature with a hood that only revealed a mouth of demonic form. It’s an empty pit of darkness.

She lays on the floor, limply, and I watch the mist with curiosity. It wavers and shakes, making its form only partially defined enough from me to tell what it is. It lets out hoarse breathing, which is half way between a growl and a hiss.

It has to be ten feet tall. It leans down, inches from my face, and now I can see its eyes- they are yellow slits that look like twin fires. There is a halo of winter around its face, making me back up as tiny daggers of ice grow on my face.

It moves closer, and I continue to back up, and its jaw continues to open wider and wider.

The smoke lurches and pain envelopes me as the dark smoke clouds my vision.

Then it dawns on me.

This creature just swallowed me. I open my eyes, and the creature and I are in an empty abyss I’d call space without stars. Empty silence rings through my ears.

The smoke moves towards me, suspended in midair, the same as I am, and when its undefined hand reaches towards me, and when it touches my eyes, vivid pictures run through my mind relentlessly.

Of the hospital bed, the funeral, the dark clothes and yelling matches that never seemed to cease.

Then I realize that these thoughts are keeping me trapped in my blistering pain. I try to picture the moments that were consumed in grief and the moments with happiness. The moments without her, and the moments with. Both were equally important, now that I think about it.

The hazy memories begin to lighten, and I see the dark mist absorbing a light that seems to be coming from me. I try to swipe at my eyes, and when I do, I see the creatures from earlier circling me. I pause, ignoring the flashing memories and listen. From within the creatures, voices from my own memories emerge.

The first one I noticed was someone I once knew begging for forgiveness. Then to my shock, I realize that all of the creatures are those in my life whom I never forgave.

I look at one and muster the only words I can.

“I forgive you for what you did.”

They once had my heart, but then they broke it. The creature convulsed as smoke came off in layers, leaving behind only people, one of my own self, and the one who broke my heart. In the image, I move up and squeeze them in a hug.

I watch the image fade away and whisper to the rest, “I forgive you.” I feel every layer of smoke coming off all the creatures until I am only left alone with the larger mist.

It comes at me, but I reach out and say, “You don’t have to hide any more.”

Then, it twitches as mist comes off of it. Left behind, is a mirror, reflecting back at me. Only, the mirror is not there anymore. It is only a repetition of my existence, and it copies everything that I do.

I will try to do what I did with the others.

“I forgive you.”

“I forgive you.” The reflection of me repeats.

Do I truly forgive myself?

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You can’t be mad at yourself for things you can’t control.” I walk closer, and the reflection of me mirrors what I said and my steps.

I open my arms and close it around myself, and the reflection follows suit, wrapping its arms around me in a tight squeeze.

“Just let it go.” This time, my reflection repeats what I said exactly as I said it. I gasp as I notice my reflection began to glow and with the malleability of water poured into my chest.

I feel a blooming joy spread across my bones, like I am sitting in a pool of warm water.

When I open my eyes, I am laying in my bed, the sheets rolled over to one side from tossing and turning. The room is dark.

I wonder what happened to her.

I close my eyes, still feeling awake, but within my eyes, I see her. Standing in a crowd of other people I once knew who passed.

For the first time, I saw her eyes.

They are deep blue, but they communicate the answer to all my questions.

“Your heart forgives you.”

I feel myself smiling, and when I open my eyes again, I see the mirror from what I think was only a dream, shattered with shards on the floor. I get out of bed, and pick up a shard, watching my face in it.

Truly, I’m not perfect, but the name of a person is the basic acknowledgment of one’s existence. And of their pain. Only because being comes with pain.

So for the first time in an eternity, I whispered, “Mirror,” and the reflection of myself repeated back, “Mirror.”

I continued, “It’s nice to meet you. I am Found.”

And her? The one with deep blue eyes? I remember her name.