tags: fiction
Vrrrrrrrrzzzzz.
Darkness fills Persephone’s vision, her dream fading away from view and memory as she slowly wakes up. Her bedroom windows filter in the morning twilight giving her just enough clarity to see her reflection in the mirror hanging from the wall.
The image of her body is fuzzy in the mirror. Her head is still recovering from the dream she is rapidly losing memory of. Everything around her is blurry. Dreams and reality not quite distinguished from each other. Is that face in the mirror her face or is it the face of a dream Persephone? Maybe it’s both. Maybe in the moment between dream and not-dream, the two realities become one. Neither able to fully push out the other.
Breath in. The edges of the mirror’s frame begin to come into focus. She can feel her senses slowly awaken like roots extending out into her room. The roots growing out of her body burrow first into the bed and then tentatively into her surroundings. At first everything she sees feels new and strange. The sheets she is wrapped in are her sheets. They are the sheets her parents bought when she was in middle school. Everything in the bedroom feels that way at first. Nothing hers until she sees it and realizes it is.
Her reflection in the mirror is the last thing for her senses to extend focus to. The person looking back at her is unrecognizable. Her mirror must be broken. Breathe out.
Her mirror breaks a lot. She will often gaze into the eyes of the person staring back at her and try and ask who they are. She wants to get to know the person that follows her every movement, but all her attempts at conversation with them end the same. The person in the mirror is just as confused as herself. They ask the same question back to her. Who is she if the person in the mirror does not even know her face?
When her mirror breaks it reminds her of middle school. Of her middle school locker. She had the bottom locker outside Mrs. Espinoza’s math classroom. When she first got the locker she spent an hour after school rearranging her books and papers. Her mom bought her one of those locker organization kits. Hers was red. It included a wire shelf, a magnetic pencil holder, and a small magnetic mirror. The wire shelf made the locker to small for her backpack and the pencil holder would fall off if anything heavier than three pens were placed in it. The mirror is the only thing that she used every year of middle school.
That was the first mirror that she noticed would sometimes break. She would be between classes crouched on the ground trying to dig out the textbook for her next class when she would glance in the mirror. It showed her an image she had never seen before. It looked like her body. They moved like her and smiled like her, but they weren’t her.
She tried explaining to her mom after school one day. “The mirror was being weird again today,” she said to her mom on the way home from school.
“What do you mean Persephone?” her mom replied to her from the driver’s seat of the car.
“The person in the mirror wasn’t me. It’s like that feeling in the morning when nothing feels real yet, you know? Like when you wake up and are all groggy. It’s like that.”
“Are you saying that you feel sleepy between classes, honey? You know you should probably start going to bed earlier. Your new swim team starts practice hours before sunrise. I think you are tired. New school and new team? You should get more rest.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Ok, then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that looking in that mirror feels like a weed being pulled out of the garden. I feel like everything becomes blurry, and I can’t breathe.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
Her shoulders leaned against the window, and she stared out at the trees zipping behind the car. Should she even try to explain what it is she saw to her Mom? Watching the trees flicker in and out of view was more relaxing. She imagined that she was a bird flying from tree to tree at the speed the car was going. Her breathing would be released of its heaviness from the forest canopy. She could almost reach out and become the bird.
Vrrrrrrzzzzz
The alarm clock on her nightstand reads 6:39 AM. Eyes wide Persephone says, “Shit! I thought I set my alarm last night”. Her awareness sharpens around her. She is going to be late for swim practice again. At least her Mom is awake. She can hear her running the coffee grinder machine downstairs. Its sharp buzzing sound rings throughout the whole house. How anyone else is able to sleep through it is baffling.
If her Mom is awake, then that means she probably packed Persephone’s breakfast and lunch. All she will have to do is grab her swim bag, school bag, and run out the door.