The Splintered Looking Glass

As I slowly hung up the phone, the disappointment in her voice still fresh in my mind, I knew I had done the right thing. It had been eight years since I’d been back home, since I’d cut off contact with everyone in my family except for my baby sister. To say it hadn’t been easy would be putting things mildly, but every therapist I’d spoken to had told me it was the best course of action. The best way forward was to turn myself into an orphan, and now so many of the people I once called family hated me for it. All of them except for her. That sweet little girl I had helped to raise from the moment I set eyes on her as a baby, until the day I packed up and moved across the country in order to free myself from the dangers of my own fractured mind. 

It wasn’t as though her path was all that different than my own when it came right down to it. Left by a mother who didn’t want to be a mother, taken into a home that by all appearances was the perfect place to grow up. Parents who dedicated their lives to teaching children, to giving voice to the often voiceless, and yet within the walls of our home? Our voices were never truly heard. We were expected to fall in line, to only show the emotions that our parents deemed expectable, while all else was labeled as manipulation or us being devious. Even our tears were viewed as weapons from the time we could barely walk, especially if you had the misfortune of being born a girl. And so it was, with great trepidation, that I had to pack up and leave her behind in that suffocating world of make believe. A world of play pretend and put on a good show for anyone who may get a peak inside. Pretend that every day didn’t begin and end with screaming fights over the most mundane, minuscule things. Endless power struggles and the realization at a young age that our parents were our first bullies. 

I tried so hard to please them in my time within those wall, that I lost myself for many years. As I began to hide myself away in my room in hopes of digging in deep enough to rediscover my own voice, I started to lose sight of her. Beyond a few moments each day to hug her and make sure she knew how much I loved her, our connection had grown frayed. The pain of seeing her raised through the trauma I was barely escaping with my life, only for me to not be strong enough to save her, was too much most days. And so I hid. I hid and hoped that I could free us both with the power of the pen. Kept my head in the clouds in hopes of finding just the right thread to follow, and I finally had. I’d found a world within my mind that others wanted to venture to as well. Parlayed it into a successful set of books and when I realized I could set up a stop on the tour in our hometown, that I could show my family that I had succeeded in ways none of them had in earnest thought possible? I ran. 

Kyra, my now sixteen year old baby sister, was always pushing me to let them see who I’d become. She didn’t understand my hiding, but then again she had never hidden herself. Even though it cost her so much, she had always been loudly herself. When they started pushing her when she was just a toddler, Kyra pushed back. They screamed, she screamed back. She never wilted away like a flower afraid of the light. She wasn’t like I was. She was strong beyond measure. She was a warrior, here to break out of the curse of this hastily cobbled together family, and here I was in my forties still too afraid to show my face back in town. 

Standing in the bathroom, I forced myself to gaze upon my own reflection. For decades, I avoided mirrors all together, feeling as though they pulled too hard at the edges of my perception of reality. But I wasn’t going to be able to continue to run from my own shadow. I could feel this clock ticking inside of me. This winding down of time I had left to live, to make peace with the childhood I wished I’d had and move forward without this heavy weight shackled to my ankle. The longer I looked into my own eyes, the further I began to disassociate. Feeling my longstanding habit of daydreaming start to take over, I saw her in my minds eye once again. The woman with the glowing third eye, her hand extended as she allowed some sort of smoke to billow out of her mouth. 

No, smoke wasn’t right. It was heavier than that, more akin to fog if anything, but it carried a charge unlike anything I’d experienced. I felt something in me calling out, begging me to turn away from her gaze, but the temptation to allow her control of my mind was far too great. I had hurt the one person I wanted more than anything to save, all because I was too afraid to face our parents. I wanted to live, I always had, but more than anything I wanted to hit pause on existence. I just needed a moment to breathe without feeling that ever present clock ticking away at my mortality. 

“Breathe, my child. The moment belongs to you, now.” Her voice was warm, enrapturing even, as it reverberated within my mind. Her mouth did not move, nor did her eyes shift in either direction from mine. We were locked into one another, two beings connected, though I was under no misconception of my being in control. 

“You’ve wished for more time, have you not? Called out countless times to no avail and now here I stand, telling you that those calls were never in vain. They simply were not right. As with all things, timing must be held in the highest regard.” Her voice seemed familiar, like a song you hear for the first time but find yourself singing along as though it were a long forgotten memory. A taste of a home you didn’t know you’d been longing for. And so, without realizing, I allowed myself to reach out to her. To allow her access to the memories holding onto me tighter than they should. All the things I wished to change, but knew I never could. Words left unsaid, actions untaken, but more than anything, I felt myself letting her into the depths of my soul. I let her into the corners of the darkness I had hidden so well. The ugly shades of despair we hide away for fear it makes us unloveable. For fear it made me worthy of the abandonment I’d faced from the first moment I drew breath on this earth. 

It was then I began to realize where I knew her voice, the timber and warmth a hidden and distant memory I was never meant to keep hold of. There before me stood a window, the being now on the other side of said glass as a young woman rushed through the falling snow towards the back of an apartment building. Clinging tightly to a bundle she held up against her chest, her eyes were everywhere and nowhere all at once. As she reached the dumpster, she paused a long moment, tears beginning to well up in her eyes, and it was then I knew exactly where we were. 

Before me stood the source of the hole in my heart I could never seem to escape. My birthmother, not much more than a child herself, looking down at me one last time before lowering my newborn body into a dumpster, the umbilical chord still attached. I caught myself banging on the glass, screams leaving my mouth before I had time to stop them, but even I knew she could never hear me. We were decades and thousands of miles apart. 

All at once, a rage bubbled up in me with nowhere to go. I longed to reach for the strange entity who brought me here, to reprimand her for her cruelty in showing me a scene I’d already imagined endlessly while I was struggling to make peace with all of this myself. The pain of growing up not knowing the truth, only to uncover it by accident and lose all faith and trust in my parents who raised me. The years of questioning if anything I knew about myself, my family, was true. Questioning if I was even real at certain points in my life. All of that pain, distilled down into this moment and she was the one who brought me here. But why? 

Unable to look upon the dumpster a moment longer as a woman discovered the infant version of myself, calling out for help, I hung my head in shame. I was defeated. This was the antithesis of my pain. The core of what made me who I was, who I would always be and what I wanted most to escape, and here was this other worldly spirit reminding me that the past is not something we can run from. 

In an instant, I felt her hands cup my face, a finger wiping tears away I wasn’t aware I’d begun to shed, as her voice began to sing a melody that felt like home. A melody that felt like a safety I’d laid awake crying for, for so many years. As she sang, i felt us slowly moving back towards the present. I could just catch the world shifting outside the window via my peripheral vision, but something deep within me told me to keep my eyes on her. To allow her song to guide me back home, back to myself. 

As we arrived and she returned to within the mirror, her touch finally leaving me and the song coming to an end, there was a peace within me that I had not known in far too long. Lifting my head slowly, the reflection began to shift slightly. I could still see the entity, but within her was superimposed my own reflection, as though we had somehow merged into one. 

Or, perhaps, we had always been one being. Perhaps she had been with me all along, guiding me from the dumpster, through the years of uncertainty and holding my tongue to keep a family I wasn’t certain I even wanted to be a part of together, all the way to through the choice to disconnect. I had never been alone, had never lost my say in where I go and whom I give my time. I knew it was too late to have that special weekend with Kyra. That promise had been broken and her trust in me would have to be mended. But leaving this earth? Leaving her behind for good? Well that just wasn’t going to solve anything. I’d always known that, but it was good to be reminded that I did matter. I mattered to Kyra, and I mattered to myself.