Mirrors

She likes seeing herself through different mirrors. Their curiously mishandled variations of her intrigue her, at best. But when she finds herself alone during random afternoons, their residual claims make her feel enslaved in moronic patterns.

There were mirrors that told her outright that she was fat. There were days that she preferred that kind of honesty rather than the recurrent limbo of indulgent euphemisms. But there are moments when she would like to be drowned, face first, in flattery and there are mirrors that oblige her.

There were mirrors that left her desolate. Some made her feel like a deity in days of rain. But she avoided these mirrors-the ones that made her irrationaly happy. She never knew where their kisses would lead her. If they would even lead her somewhere.

She used to settle for mirrors that eradicated her sense of self for she sometimes got tired of living alone. She let them mold her, let them pull her into automatic delusions (she was a gypsy princess, a fairy, a miasma of unrequited emotions). She liked laughing a lot during those days and basked in the freedom of reinvention. She pranced and preened in front of these mirrors while trying out different personalities. But at the end of these half-shadowed days, she would disrobe slowly. She shed off skin after luxurious skin for hours at a time. She knows that they do not appreciate the spontaneity of revelation.

What she likes best are the ones that reflect her accurately. Her minute details do not bother them. And because they are rare, she always tries to stand as close to them as possible. She hopes that they would tell her the secret of beginnings- clue her in about something newer and more tangible than regret. But because she stands too close, her reflection fogs up. In minutes, she is as blurry as a distant memory. As dismissible as old photographs.

Sometimes, when she clutches these mirrors too eagerly, they break and shatter and all of a sudden, she finds herself in irredeemable bits and pieces, as lost as the sky.

When this happens, she merely stands up and brushes off remnants that may be stuck in her hair, on her dress. She doesn’t want to leave any traces of past misfortunes. It is not because she is unfeeling, nor can the forgetting be owed to false coyness. She believes that this is the only way she can remember who she was before all this. The only way she can relearn happiness.