A Look Through The Mirror

I nodded, still staring at the surface of the mirror. I couldn't break sight with it, somehow maybe afraid that if I did it would disappear or maybe attack me instead. I had to keep looking but she had to make sure that I understood.

So she reached out and cupped my chin, turning my face and my eyes up to stare into hers.

"I want to take the chance," I told her, knowing that she needed me to say it out loud, "Whatever it takes for my second chance."

I don't really know if I understood what it was that I was agreeing to. Everything that had happened up to this point had the hazy uncertainty of a dream, that vague sense of out-of-control momentum where you're saying maybe not what it is that you want to say but what it is that you know you need to instead. But was that really any different than any other time?

We might vary in our level of conscious awareness, but there is definitely an argument to be made that we do not ever make a real decision in our lives. There is a potential that we only do just that, speak the things that need to be said because that is the only way that it can work. That we fumble over ourselves trying to prove free will when the truth is that we're no freer than a calculator and that our only virtue is in our complication.

So maybe I only agreed here because it was the thing to do, but I don't know if even I buy that. I know myself enough to know that I was **** and that if someone offered me the chance to have my second chance then there is nearly no price I wouldn't agree to pay.

And here this woman was asking for no price whatsoever, at least not yet.

"Then look into the mirror," she said, releasing my chin and watching as it fell automatically down, "Come forward and stare deep. Look into the depths of it and tell me what it is you see. Tell me."

It was with no little apprehension that I moved forward. Some part of me was still holding out and holding back, but I managed to quiet it long enough that I could scrape my chair forward and bend closer to the mirrors surface.

Inch by inch I came closer, and with each inch the effort redoubled. Something was on my chest pushing back. Something was on my shoulders holding me there. Something was digging its claws in and grasping me back as if I was standing at the edge of a cliff and it was the only thing standing between me and oblivion.

Maybe oblivion was exactly what it was.

I stared into the growing surface. I saw the reflection in it ripple and I was certain of it at this point and I turned my face downwards and stared into the depths of the silver pool and I knew, somehow, that it wasn't a reflection I was seeing at all.

My memory isn't the greatest and the tent had been insubstantial and confusing when I'd stepped inside. I couldn't exactly tell you what color it was or whether there was a design on the fabric of it. I didn't even know how many poles held up the canvas top, but I knew enough to know that what was reflected in the mirror was not in this room at all.

For starters, it was daytime in the mirror. Second, it was long and expansive fields of grain and corn. Third, they were moving with the momentum of someone traveling past them. Fourth, I knew that sight.

I would recognize my hometown anywhere.

The reflection in the mirror was the sight out the window as the bus pulled away. The rushing fields a blur of yellows and greens as we rumbled past them. The light growing dimmer as my eyelids grew heavier and the rhythm of the rocking of the bus drew me deeper and deeper into my rest until it was nearly impossible to keep my eyes open at all.

I was an inch above the mirror now, my sight filled with the sight that I'd seen long ago. And in the now which would soon become my future I felt her hand pressing on the back of my head and pushing me down. I felt the cool of the mirror as it kissed my skin and parted to let me inside. I felt the darkness of sleep take me, a slumber the same as one I'd slept so long ago.

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