reflection
December 2020
The girl — she does not know how to feel, anymore. Doesn’t know how to write in the past tense because of the memories that a was might hold, doesn’t remember what it’s like to love someone so much that the thought of them is this ridiculously fluttering thing, can’t bring herself to take a single photo — hasn’t, in months, because the idea of immortalising something makes her feel sick. Living forever has become tragic, to her. She thinks, though, and it’s a constant, the thinking. Lets words echo through her head like a fever before she has that tiring reminder that fevers need medicine, need easing, curing. Breaking, but she doesn’t think she’s broken, yet. She is strewn across her living room floor like ash settled off of a breeze, watching her reflection and laughing — because that’s not her.
That pale thing, a creature more than a human, jutted ribs and hollowed eyes and a skeleton which doesn’t fit in its body, which is clawing to escape her skin — not her. She wants to put something to paper, draw ink across a page until the words start to sink. The bed shifts beneath her — it’s an airbed, and deflating by the day — so suddenly as she moves that she’s cast onto the hardwood floor, one elbow and the side of her head cracking like an opening cloud against it. Pain is registered, though it’s a vague thing, an idea that her mind seems to be entertaining rather than an experience it’s being put through. Ow, she almost says, but the sentiment dies on her tongue, slightly less vague a realisation that speaking — it burns. Not me, she thinks, now, as she glances up at the mirror and a shell stares back, eyes which are so glassy it’s as if they’re not looking at all, hair matted to the side of a purpling forehead.
It’s bizarre, though. Two reflections, the skylight and the living room mirror, and this stranger has greeted her. She can’t bring herself to wave — can’t really bring herself to move, but she tells herself that’s just the iron deficiency — but manages a dwindling smile which slips off of her face as quickly as it came. The reflection; she pities it, really. Because it smiles back, face contorting lips upwards in what she thinks is a grin, but the sheer brokenness of said grin’s beholder feels inexplicably wrong, in this. You’ll get better, and she mouths the words as a promise, sees the reflection’s eyes flicker once with what she believes to be something akin to hope. Hope. A foreign thing.
She turns from the mirror — the stranger, who feels remarkably familiar — and tries to pull herself up, a weak grasp on the edge of the table doing nothing more than letting her relish the feeling of her palm on cold steel. The effort warrants another thud of her head against hardwood, and there is a rushing shock to the bridge of her nose that comes with impacts such as this. Not pain, though. Nothing precise like that. Again, she tugs, tugs at herself, her arms, her core, and makes it a few more centimetres off of the floor before she’s back down again. That rush — felt like tears, or the beginnings of them, but she can’t remember a reason to be crying. Can’t remember a reason for the reflection to be crying, either, but when she twists her head to glance at it in the floor-length mirror, there are those telltale rivulets splitting the grime on its cheeks. Turns away. She has to — something feels off, about that. She won’t let herself look at the skylight, either, because she knows which eyes will greet her there.
A third try, a third attempt at shifting the bones which have no right to be this weary, and this time she rolls over until she’s flat on her stomach, nose pressing into the floor. Two palms pushed into the ground on each side of her head and she heaves, shoves and shoves until something remembers what it’s doing inside of her and she’s propelled upwards, a forwards motion she wasn’t anticipating, tripping into the air in front of her and crashing lopsidedly into the sofa. But she’s up. Gripping onto the leather cushion, certainly, dimly aware that letting go will quite literally be her downfall — she can see her knuckles fading to white with the strength of this grasp. Iron deficiency, she lists again, the only reason she could possibly be this fragile, twisting herself in a rather sudden movement to be sitting on the sofa rather than pushing desperately against it. Her chest heaves, she resists the urge to lie down, and the dull ache in her head is more of a pulse, now. Wants to make itself known.
No, she thinks, she will not succumb to this tiredness. There are no reflections to glance at, now, nothing unnerving to throw her off of this stilted attempt to get up. She blinks, once, and briefly, feeling only then just how heavy her eyelids are — it’s an effort to push them back open, in the moments after. Not tiredness, but a feeling that dances in rings around the idea of fatigue, a sort of blind breathlessness which aches to let her rest. She shifts again, feels the backs her her thighs already beginning to stick to the leather seats. Come on, and the two syllables are pleading; there is an urgency here that some part of her brain is privy to, and yet she cannot think what she so needs to do. Live — a momentary flash, as unsettling as it is jarring, but surely that’s a given. It can’t be the right variant, here. Everyone needs to live, and god did she sit through enough biology lessons to know that. The thought flashes again, though, like a traffic signal, except this one feels like a cinematic shot in one of those tragic films where a traffic signal is the last thing someone sees before a fatal car crash, an accident, a fall. She’s not falling, though. Finds herself getting angry at this moroseness, this absolute pessimism. The anger pushes her up, barely, though she is standing now and she can’t quite remember the process which got her here. She’s up. Clutching a shelf so hard that she’s certain the wood will splinter in her palms, but up nonetheless.
Two of the three steps, now, the sleep wake walk idea that came with a TV show she barely remembers watching. Just walk. All that’s left, the walking, but something in her tells the girl that this will not go as smoothly as walking should. Walking will take her past the glass which separates the kitchen and the living room, will show her again that skeletal reflection that isn’t her. She’s more conscious, now, slightly more aware, has more of a reservation around this creature that she’s seeing in every shiny surface. Not me, again, but this time the thought feels wrong. Slips through her hands like sand to the sea — doubt. Maybe. She blocks that out. The first step isn’t as momentous as she feels like it could have been. This, as in, there is no stumble. No collapse. The journey that this single pace has set out will be far from stable — while she has not fallen, her vision is blurring, her movements are stilted and trembling, her breath arches back down into her lungs in a fashion which almost stings her throat.
She’s moving, though. Moving upright, moving about as steadily as she knows she can go — arms in front of her as if they’ll offer protection, though the likelihood is they will fold as she does if she happens to trip. One step, and two more, and it’s nothing more than a dance with the air around her when she thinks about it enough. Luck has it — luck doesn’t really have it, but she’ll call it luck with the same logic that she calls some days good days even if they’re not — that the kitchen is only a few paces away, only a few seconds in which she is entirely without support. Something, she is beginning to realise — something is wrong. The reflection in the glass partition tells her this much as she edges along it, tells her that the eyes which stare back aren’t so foreign to her at all, tells her that these jutting bones do not belong to an unrecognised entity. Out of the memories she can dredge from this fog, she can start to see similarities to the person she knows that she knows — she’ll close her eyes, block it out, but the brief moments in which her eyes are shut will throw her off balance and send her careering into the fridge.
This time, there is a sound which tears from her throat. Something which finds its roots between a sob and a scream, something which grows far further than that, stretches out into realms of such desperation that she is certain, this is where the reflection must dwell. The reflection. Her reflection. She hasn’t hit that conclusion, though — or more, it hasn’t hit her. It’s all she can do to twist away from the fridge, and she can tell from the way the weight of her whole body collided with the fridge with her wrist trapped between the two entities, something has been damaged. It doesn’t hang limp, the wrist; isn’t broken, she doesn’t think, but moving it sends a sharp burst of something which she doesn’t recognise up through her arm. Nostalgia? Couldn’t be — that’s more of a bittersweet thing, surely. There’s a sense of nostalgia here, certainly, though maybe it’s just the hanging weight of the blood she can feel echoing through her veins. Look, something tells her, and she does look, focuses her eyes with such determination that she can only stare as hard as she is staring for a few seconds. A few seconds, where the world wasn’t fuzzing over.
She blinks again — somehow, impossibly but still somehow — her eyelids are heavier. The picture her mind has taken of the kitchen: the oven in the corner, the window to her left, the cupboards full of pots and pans she never was particularly good at using — it’s fading, as she does. The hob, in her peripheral. Backed by stainless steel which is (helpfully?) brushed in a way that means she doesn’t have to see her exact reflection, just the outline. She turns, leans her weight on the counter, stares at the metal as if it’ll clear. It doesn’t, but she can see enough from the way the figure looking back is slumped so acutely over, from the way shoulders almost stick out where they shouldn’t.
Here, I’m afraid, the realisation lies.
It’s her. A neck twisted so fast to look at the window she’s convinced for a moment it’ll simply break, and a reflection staring back — those dulled eyes, that matted hair, those bones clawing at the inside of her skin — her reflection. An entire puzzle, and too many pieces, and all at once, and she’s buckling under the weight of all of those lines fitting together.
She turns. Pales. Blinks, and this time she can barely pull her eyes back open.
The stove. Every knob, twisted to full — and yet, no flame.
This, the final piece.
Carbon monoxide, and the words hit her like a skidding car in midwinter. Not deliberate, but with enough force to knock the wind from her lungs, to shatter her bones, to stop her heart. There is a note, somewhere, she can remember this much — desperately scrawled on a post-it, I’m sorry written four times within the space of three sentences, please forgive me a close runner-up. Ah. That’s the ache. The simultaneous numbness. The reflection. When was the last time she moved, before this?
Some part of her tells the girl that it’s not too late. This, in part, is truthful — she could stagger her way to the front door, make it out to the street and collapse in such a dramatic way that an ambulance is called. Another part — a bigger part, and the tragedy sinks into her skin — reminds her that though she cannot remember it, there will have been a reason for this. The final piece of this achingly huge jigsaw. Living will mean regretting, as it always does. A retracing of steps — as unsteady as the first time, with a pounding head and an aching throat and a throbbing wrist, so many broken things — and the stove has been left on.
The girl takes a second to stare at the mirror, to acknowledge all that is, remember all that was. The spectre that stares back — it smiles. It knows, and it aches for that fragile release. This, she thinks, though she tries her best to will the thought away — this, the coward’s way out. She crashes into the deflated airbed with about as much grace as a dying person would be expected to have, pulls the blanket over her every feature as a coroner might a corpse.
She will not be alive to hear the carbon monoxide alarm start to howl.
She will not be alive as paramedics crash in with their masks on, practised eyes raking the scene and finding the bed, the girl, the body.
The coward’s way out, and yet. How deliriously happy those cowards must have been.
