Mirrors
Thursday, July 27, 2006
The day began like many others before it. A pulsating buzz married to an excruciatingly loud, painfully blunt Top-40 song sliced through sleep like it was never there to begin with. The room is dark, shades drawn, but the forcibly contrived scenario performed by the airtime-embellished voices now emanating from the dual 4-inch speakers on his nightstand illuminates the dungeon in which he retires.
A spotlight on a shallow soul.
He makes his way out of bed to the bathroom, stumbling over loose floorboards, walking with the tangled grace of someone much older than his twenty-nine years. With every step, a creak. With every creak, a pause, a promise to step lighter. His journey through the hallway is marked by a regiment of photographs. Framed, held captive behind panes of glass, the images depict someone other than the man walking the hall at this moment. The person in these photos appears young, healthy and at ease among friends.
Shortly after his feet exchange wide-plank knotty pine for the infinitely colder tile of the bathroom, he finds himself facing a familiar foe. As far as he’s concerned, mirrors are the tell-tale sign, the absolute reflection of self worth. Unfiltered and unadulterated, a mirror doesn’t lie. At least not the way people do.
As he’s fixed onto the transference of lines, colors and textures reflected in the smudgy glass that hangs above porcelain, he notices movements don’t match. He raises a hand upward, but the foil’s corresponding limb remains firmly planted on his side. A delicate tilt of the head results in a spiteful grin on a statuesque reflection. The lines sprouting from angled eyes are slightly deeper, even more sinister than his own. He is now aware that the subject staring out from the tainted glass is not himself. Someone different, but someone dangerously familiar. Abraham Crowley is not alone.