They told me to write about something weird. So I did.
It’s the weirdest thing I encounter all day, yet so many never think twice about it. It’s concerning, how it watches motionless, as we enter and leave without paying it any mind. It’s odder still when we stare into it, and find it staring back.
People say that it’s not about what you look like in the mirror; that a bit of glass doesn’t have power over you. But, not many seem to believe that, and even those who do come back and perform their rituals before it day-after-day.
We pass it, wipe it clean, use it to shave, make faces at it and sometimes even cry before it on our worst days. And all that time, it’s watching us. Learning about us. Storing each motion and emotion within it, as it replicates our faces and notes the time and the paces we take before it. For all of our life it watches; for some, it may even know us better than we do, for others, it’s the only thing that sees us as we really are.
All this happens, unthinkingly, every day. Yet for all that the mirror sees and knows, for all that trust we have in holding it close and keeping it in our homes, we don’t even know what the mirror looks like.
Perhaps that’s why it’s the faceless figure with skin as fragile and smooth as glass. Who appears each night in my dreams wearing the faces of people who I thought were long past, and speaking the words I’ve said so many times, only in reverse. Who scared me so much that it stuck in my mind to call out when they asked me to write about something weird in my life.
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