I stare closer into the smooth, glossy surface, noticing every little detail of the image reflected in it.
These bumps, where do these bumps come from?
I run my fingers across the minutely rough surface of my skin, eyebrows furrowing.
I’m thinking too much again.
Stepping away from the mirror, I watch my own reflection shrink as I do so, noticing the little bumps on my skin disappearing along the process, while a few other mirrors slide into view.
Bright light bounces from one silver surface to another, scattering into different directions onto more reflective surfaces, illuminating the grand room of ebony. As I pace across, aisle after aisle, light strikes my body and casts shadows long and short onto the black marbled floor. Once in a while, a ray would come from a lower angle, casting a giant silhouette of me onto the high ceiling.
A room-full of mirrors, all of different shapes and sizes. That’s where I am.
Some make me look wider than I am, some make me taller than I can ever be in this lifetime. Some shrink places I want shrunk, while some enlarge features I never knew I had. I watch my image change as I transition from one mirror to another, transforming into a hundred different versions of myself within hours at a time.
When I was a lot younger, this would’ve been hours and days’ worth of fun; making faces, pretending to be somebody else apart from myself, imagining the possibilities of me.
Now I dread looking into mirrors, seeing disappointment staring back into my eyes. I’m afraid of looking into the glossy surfaces, and see a monster. I hate looking into them, and see the flaws and the failures and the could-have-beens materializing before my eyes.
And yet, I cannot stop staring at them, all the different imperfections in both body and spirit. With every step I look a little closer, a little deeper, a little harder, to find something new that was wrong with myself.
And I never seem to fail at that.
It’s addictive: self-destruction.
If only I am a little thinner here, or a little more built there. If only this is smaller, that is sharper, those are better shaped. If only I did this, or if I did that, maybe I wouldn’t have look like this. Maybe I wouldn’t be feeling this way. Maybe I would’ve been a different person today. A better person, maybe.
I step closer to one of those once more, picking at the magnified pores on my face. Poking at the black gunk in the crevices. How disgusting. I’m disgusting.
I watch as my gaze intensifies, pupils dilate, tears pooling on my lower eyelids, lying comfortably closer and closer to the precipice of my eyebags. The whites of these orbs slowly turn the shade of pink as one of the pools overflows onto my cheek, barely hanging on to my chin. The other rivers elegantly, tipping ever so slightly at the edge where my jaw ends.
How much longer do I have to do this.
How much longer until I finally lose my mind.
I swing around, eyes darting from one corner to the other, looking for that one particular mirror that I needed right at this moment. One that shows me only what I want to see. The only one that can take away the pain for a little while and fill the void with pleasant distractions like false hope and day-dreams.
I retrace my steps to where I saw it last. I remember exactly where it is. I always do.
I turn left on the second junction, and two more rights, then follow the flow of the route to yet another junction, to take another left. I have walked these path so many times, that the tens of fake pathways reflected in the mirrors don’t faze me any more than the occasional appearance of the gigantic version of me on the ceiling, tailing after me as if it is chasing my actual smaller self.
