Non Fiction
Issue #1
Mirror Image
Once upon a time, the story paused, just like that. A big, black comma, an intake of breath. To be continued…Other people wrote their stories around me, but mine was shelved the moment *ana walked into my mirror.
That was just a metaphor. You know that. That was what my life became from that moment forwards. Like words suggesting something other than themselves, my body came to represent, for me, my self. In a time of change, of uncertainty and upheaval, control over my body meant ultimate control over my universe. The world experienced and interacted with this outer presentation of my self, so a perfect body meant you’d see a perfect me. It’s hard to rationalize now. It was obvious then.
It wasn’t stupidity. It wasn’t vanity. Please don’t lose faith in me, reader. Please be assured that your genial host isn’t just a shallow bimbo. True, while the world fought wars, argued politics and suffered politics, my life became a carousel of clothes, concealment and calories. (Ever considered how many calories there are in a carrot? Let me console you: there are just thirteen).
It was such a gradual decline, from sunshine, through twilight, into an eventual empty pit of blackness. An emptiness that grew in the pit of my stomach to engulf me.
The date *ana arrived is uncertain. Certainly, if it was, the people who make calendars should feel obliged to strike it off. Remove it from my wall, please, it’s not the sort of anniversary one tends to celebrate. She eased herself into my life, one appendage at a time. An arm, a leg, a foot, a foothold. Like me, only in reverse. My foothold was lost, my arm, my leg, my self shrank. We became so well acquainted it seemed ludicrous that we’d never been friends before. It seemed even more ridiculous that we’d ever be parted.
*ana filtered my world through her eyes. It was such a relief to relinquish control of a life that had never made complete sense anyway, every other word a foreign one. At first, the sensation was euphoric. Then, simply numbing. The world was experienced through cotton wool, viewed through smoky glass. A foetus-like suspension, unable to touch. Unable to be touched.
*ana held the mirror. And, inch by inch, she held my life in her hands. Frozen by my own reflection, the fear of betraying her paralysed my voice. Still, there began a burgeoning suspicion that she was cocooning me in pretence. My feelings of hate towards her began to write themselves on the back of my eyes, for me to read and re-read. Her name burnt deeper into me, scorching me. The pain was unbearable. Death or madness seemed inevitable. Seemed enviable.
Please, someone rescue me.
Salvation was found in a stranger. Hers was sympathy born of obligation, not of compassion. My skeletal frame was ‘disturbing,’ it was ‘bad for morale.’ She was an inferior lifeline, but she was a lifeline. She melted my bones, and helped me to spin a web to touch the world again. The warmth of tears replaced my burning. Washed *ana away.
Things are never so simple. These words make me sound so in control. No. Take the first and last of my words and pull them apart. Stretch them in front of you. Further. Over days, weeks, months, years. Make every letter a piercing moment in time, and every blank space an infinite yawn, where nothing is, nothing was, and nothing will be. Rearrange the letters. Not an anagram, but a language that no-one can understand. Useless. This is not how it felt. But it is as close as you should ever hope to feel it.
There is no promise that as you read this, things are any better. But as ‘better’ was written, she was gone. Absent from the mirror, from my mind and from the page.
I hope she stays away. For as long as she is here, I am not.