Shattering Me

Shattering Me


Everyone has a mirror inside themselves.

My inside is a place of winding cobwebs of fake gilded gold and silver with dust clinging like a skin to the floor, the walls, everything. There is little light, little hope inside of myself. Like an attic in an old tale of ghosts and ghouls, only real in my mind, real in my soul this place creaks and groans, held up by boundless lies to soulless reasons. It is coated with grime and hidden meanings, surrounded by topless walls that don’t let in any light. Or anyone.

I live here. I dance in false glory of what I’ve created. Myself.

My mirror is taller than I could ever hope to be, in stature or in true height and wider than any greed that could stuff itself inside any noble-man of past tales. Around the edges are gold, silver and platinum metal workings from the days when it was royal to weave metal, when what was on the outside was everything. And it was. It was the outside of my mirror, the outside of how I saw myself.

The mirror itself was clear in the center, and my smile – practiced in the long hours of the night for those who would never see my true smile if it existed – shone clear in the polished surface. The edges of the mirror were warped beautifully to bend an image however to take on the shape of whatever the looker wished to behold. Movement too far from the center warped my own image so I was never the same heart to the same person. I changed whenever I moved from one side to the other, dancing to falsities and smiling an unreal joy I never felt in my soul.

It was a false image, one that I upheld not for myself, but for other people. I was too afraid to become anything that wasn’t satisfactory to anyone else. So I became someone who wasn’t me: someone else that everyone else wanted.

And it was all destroyed in four hours.

First, he stepped inside the walls and scared me until I backed up against the mirror, afraid to let him near it. But he didn’t look at my falsities right away. Those would come later. First he looked at the dusty cobwebs woven of false memories bearing the dust of ages I’d never experienced. He frowned and they burned, the fire eating at them like a hungry devil searching for lies of its own kind, making me shiver and quake. They were gone; my past was history.

“The past is for learning, not for living.”

Next he looked at the walls I’d managed to build up. These were beautifully ruthless creations of granite that I’d slowly built up and quickly made thicker by small moments of unpleasantness. The swirls of white in the black stretching walls of un-cracked  barrier stood strong and laughing at any Don Quixote who dared to brave the dragon like it was a windmill. But they wouldn’t last two hours under his stare. He reached out a hand and didn’t even have to touch them before they were crumbling, falling like my un-spilt tears at the destruction of one of my greatest creations.

“If you never let anyone in, how can you truly understand and feel?”

Next, he turned around and looked at me, piercing through me where I stood, leaning, shivering and ready to scream. But I kept my lips closed and my fists clenched in false violence, ready to defend the nothing I had built up my entire life. He took a step closer and I stuck my chin up in the air, daring him to do what he was about to destroy. Taking another step closer he looked at me and not the mirror.

My invisible foundations broke from underneath me and I suddenly felt as if I wanted to collapse. I stepped away from the mirror of my own accord while he was just a few feet away, not moving, just sitting, still talking. He’d never stopped talking. I paced then, in the last hour of my own defeat. He watched me pace in front of that mirror, giving him glimpses of it as I moved, and in the end I could see him frown, even though he’d never stopped smiling.

For a moment he stepped next to me to look into the mirror. I saw my own beautiful reflection, the false smile, the petty words, the promises never kept and suddenly wondered why. Next to me he was so different. My mirror did him no justice and I wondered if it truly did me any. It was that last thought I tried to submerge into the darkness before it came out to let him destroy everything I’ve ever known.

“No.”

He pushed me aside gently, and with words he spoke over those last ten minutes, cracked the mirror. The reflecting pieces fell like a dangerous rain of knives, ready to cut and slash the thing that had gotten to them. But no one was harmed. He stood and looked at the gilded edges until they melted away, the false and final barrier of my untrue inner self disappearing under his eyes. And I just stared, still pacing, trying not to cry as he called me out, called me on any bullshit I’d ever done, and I knew he’d call me on it in the future if I stepped any closer to that old mirror again.

Holding out a hand he gingerly offered me something else. His face was turned away, looking off into some distant corner of me, and I don’t even think he realized what he’d done. The mirror I took from his hand was small, simple and unadorned. I secretly wanted to ask him why, why this mirror was nothing like my old one, the one I’d spent so much time to create. But I already knew the answer. Don’t be you for everyone else, be you for you.

Looking down at this mirror later after he’d gone and lay elsewhere I smiled for the first time with honestly, purity and truth. I started crying when I saw this reflection of the real me, the one that was held captive behind that gigantic fake mirror. This is who I was. And while I’m not sure if I should forgive him or thank him for destroying everything I’ve never known, I do know that this is the happiest I’ve been since that mirror was placed in my soul.

I smile all the time now, unless I am asleep. And even then, that’s debatable. It’s hard to be sure when you wake up with a smile on your face.