fiction II.

the mirror.

by christiane eave

Have you ever noticed the tiny flaws behind the glass of a mirror? I usually don’t. I never did, but once.
It was the first time I took acid: LSD. Well, I had taken some before, but I was drunk and didn’t feel a thing until I slapped my in-turn boyfriend having sex. I don’t remember what I “hallucinated”, I just remember that I slapped him really hard and then broke out crying feeling really ashamed and childish.
This time, I did feel childlike, but in a whole different way.
It stared slowly, as an infantile innocence filling me drop by drop, a warm sensation of safety and joy. I laughed until it drowned me and then it overflowed, wetting the bed, the warm, soft bed. Then everything slowly started to take life: the lamp was looking at me, quietly, amiably, smiling. The walls weren’t precisely melting, as they call it, but were undulating, dancing. The curtains painted with flowers showed a green dragon swimming in a golden wave of cloth. The room, which wasn’t moving, of course, was filled with living things, almost talking.
I absorbed my surroundings, drunken with life itself, with the creations of unrecognizable humans that didn’t know they had given birth to a fat, mustached wardrobe.
Then I looked at the mirror. I saw someone that stood still looking back at me. It looked like me, but it wasn’t. Her eyes were made of glass. She was empty.
It scared the hell out of me at first. I didn’t want to look back into the mirror. There was something strange about it, something I had never seen before.
I didn’t look, actually, for what felt like many hours, and then, reuniting the valor to face that which I didn’t recognize, I looked in.
It was frozen.
Everything around me shined and shivered, breathing. The mirror didn’t. She was still, like looking into an old, dusty painting of dead nature. But even paintings have a soul.
I looked harder, trying to understand what was so different about a mirror; what was that made it so lifeless.
I saw it, poor mirror, all alone and cold. He had his own dents, his own flaws, but nobody had ever seen them.
It’s hard to see it, but behind the glassy face, there is a mirror.

Paris. Sept. 2008.