I’ve always heard that mirrors reflect one’s truth. Sure, call me foolish, it’s obvious, right?
Well, it’s supposed to be true…
But the truth is, I don’t recognize myself in my reflection.
I see myself. I’m there, that’s me… but it’s not me. The “me” I see in the glass might have been me, at some point or place I can no longer remember.
Distant childhoods and memories of someone who’s no longer here. Is that still my self? Because, in my opinion, I no longer am.
I see myself, I see someone I used to be and have ceased to be. A “me” whose existence has faded away. I wish I were her, I wish I were my reflection, which seems more alive than I am. Those memories of once being a happy child are now nothing but fragments and shattered glass of an adult who got lost in her growing up.
It’s hard, isn’t it?
Hard to accept that the happiest moments of your life, those memories you once lived and cherished with youthful enthusiasm, are now just anecdotes of a past so distant it doesn’t even seem like yours. That child, so full of life, who once looked at the world with dreamy eyes, has turned into a woman with a dead gaze, exhausted from a job where she tried to protect her loved ones from the unknown.
Every time I look at my reflection, that little girl I once was jumps into my memory, filling me with a deep sense of guilt.
Why couldn’t she keep her smile, MY smile?
Why?
Damn the world that brought me to this. Damn the life that led me here. Damn the existence that forces us to persist in a story with no end.
Now, I see myself in my reflection. That little girl is gone, she’s left. I’m no longer her, perhaps I never was.
The noose around my neck is the reflection of what I am now. My feet tremble on the stool despite my resistance, there’s nothing left for me, only to jump and hope I never touch the ground again.
A breath will calm me, a calm that will allow me to move forward. One step, another step, and the noose will tighten. As the last traces of my consciousness remain here, I look at my reflection and I see myself, I see what I’ve become…
I see myself.
And I see how broken I am.
