Mirror mirror on the wall

"Please close the door."  The mechanical voice repeated as the metal pillars squealed shut, silencing the persistent ding of the lift. After a heavy workout session at the gym, all I wanted to do today was wear my bugs bunny onsie and sleep all day under my cozy covers. Even the journey through the lift to my apartment on the 26^th floor felt taxing.

Through the mirror in the lift, I noticed a girl in a dark sweatshirt with its hood on. Her frame was drooping and she was standing unnaturally straight. I tried to ask which floor she wanted but she said nothing so I shrugged and pressed twenty-six. I’ve been a victim of horrible claustrophobia ever since I was a child, which leads to my irrational fear of lifts. As the small compartment of the lift hauled me and the mysterious woman in the hoodie up through each floor, the minuscule part of my brain which is somewhere always scared of a mysterious encounter with an eerie stranger in a closed space had kick-started pre-hyperventilating in the anticipation of a weird occurrence. Halfway through twenty-six the pulley of the lift groaned and the confined steel compartment began trembling. A rope snapped, the lift jerked. The girl in the hoodie flew toward the other end of the lift. The lights and the air-conditioned controlled vents collapsed. The horrible feeling in my gut increased.

In the fraction of a second, The girl next to me slithered to the control panel and pressed the ground floor. Her face was completely shadowed. I tried to retaliate but she seemed to have been harboring superhuman strength. The lift gave a single harsh screech and the remains of the quivering compartment nosedived straight for the bottom floor. All sense of gravity dwindled out of the claustrophobic chains of my heart. Time slowed to the quark of a second.  My sense of comprehension flowed away into an abyss. The lift was hurtling straight for the bottomless ground and toward the genesis of my worst nightmare.  

Negative-one, the panel dinged and the girl materialized in front of my face.

Negative-two, the blaring warning alarms matched my thundering heartbeats.

Negative-three, something throttled me. A cold, firm hand to my throbbing pulse.

Negative-four, the girl slid off her hood.

Negative-five, She was me.

Underground, The panel dinged. The doors shrieked open. Another girl came in. She looked like me too.

Fight or flight my brain screamed. I rammed one of my reflections to the door and fled. Left, left, right. All scenarios my mind could conjure involving me emerging alive out of this labyrinth of menacing ghouls claiming my identity are in vain. I hear a wrenching scream a few dreams away. It was mine. Or one of my multiple reflections’. I was hallucinating, No, this isn't real, it can’t be real. I tell myself this chanting it like a mantra with the beads of a rosary. I couldn’t possibly know. I will never know. Because I wake up, sweating buckets, to my blaring alarm, of course. Like I was snapped out of a horror movie trailer and zoomed back into the realm of reality.

“Hey, you doing you alright there champ?”  

My friend and roommate Tia sitting on the couch in our living room asked me. She looked as calm as the surface of splashing waves on a summer evening. Sipping her coffee in tranquil.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“Then why do you have blood on your forehead?”

I gave her a puzzled look, of course, she must've been kidding. I had a bad dream sure, but blood? She went too far with this one. At that very moment though, I felt a wet tickling sensation on my forehead. I lifted my arm and stretched out my finger to touch it and I felt blood gushing from it, oozing underneath my fingertips and trickling onto my pulsating cheek. Dread crawled onto my skin, my brain playing the macabre memories of the nightmare in pieces like a slow reel of blurred flashes. The fear of my existence dwindling in the sea of conformed sheep, long forgotten, haunting me more than the nightmare itself. My fingers twitched as I turned the center lock of the main door. A nervous tick. I walked to the lift of our apartment. The doors slid open, and the lights flicked on. I turned my gaze to look at the mirror of the dingy elevator compartment soiled with candy wrappers, and random gunk. And there she was, a slouched frame and drooping shoulders. With a silk red wound on her forehead, a haunting gaze glinting with tragedy. Me. A spitting image of me, with disheveled hair and two black lines haphazardly drawn over the eyelids. A carbon copy. Just inside the mirror, and I probably wouldn’t be so terrified, if only, she would lift her arm as I had just then.

As I realized in that final moment, in the beauty and the despair of my last breath, all this while, the thing that scared me the most wasn’t the fear of being suffocated or being alone in a closed elevator. It was neither the fear of abandonment and nor was it acrophobia. it was beyond irrational and tangible phobias. It’s the fear of giving in to conformity, of changing myself, and everything I hold true to my identity to be more attuned to society and its diabolical standards. All of this just to keep pace with this voracious race of the survival of humanity. The burden of holding on to the black and white dichotomous worldview of the human psyche. I feared the girl in the mirror. The girl she would become when she’d be propelled into this cruel world, wide-eyed and naïve to the ways of humankind. Merciless and unrelenting, shredding her innocence and hope to bits. Turning her into someone she’d never even wish upon her worst enemy. Leaving her begging for this nightmarish reality to be a phantasm. A figment of her imagination.