Something is Missing

I... hate... mirrors.

I am not sure when it started, but I have had both a curious fascination and aversion to mirrors ever since I was young. Some might ask if I am afraid of my own reflection. I would say, 'yes' and 'no'. reflections in common things such as a window or water puddle are fine. Those are weak when compared to the 1 to 1 vibrant reflection you get from a mirror.

When I was young, I was fascinated by mirrors, especially full-length ones. My mind would wonder what a reflection was. Obviously, a mirrored reflection is the observed surrounding light bouncing off a smooth shiny surface, but as a youth I imagined it was much more than that.

To me a mirror was a portal into another world, a parallel universe, all be it reversed. In my childhood imagination I wondered if the reflected world went on as far as mine did. If only I could step through the reflective glass to see, but I could not with my reflection in the way. I would spend minutes on end trying to peer around corners of reflected doorways in a fixed mirror just to see if I could see the edge of the reflected world.

My curiosity went on like this until I started the practice of gazing into my reflection's eyes, waiting to see if it would move will I stood absolutely still. It never did. But in these futile experiments a strange thought occurred to me. A thought which puzzled me at first, but then filled me with a sort of dread too far to fathom, but the more I pondered on it the closer the dread crept.

As I stared long and hard into my reflection's eyes and deep into its pupils I began to think; which one of us is the one staring into the mirror? It is true that his world reflects mine with all things reversed, but is it not true that my world reflects his as well? Does my reflection not move because I am standing still or can I not move without his actions? If we are true copies of one another, then we would both decide to make the same movement at the same time thus negating my experiment.

It was then I realized a frightening notion in my childhood imagination. If his thoughts are mine and mine are his, then he is thinking what I am thinking. He realizes what I realize. If he is the reflection, wouldn't he want to escape into my world? Or if I am the reflection, is it possible he would want to explore mine?

Each imaginative revelation bore with it a new morbid thought. If my reflection did invade my side of the mirror, is it true that only one of us can exist in any given reality? If he came through the mirror and liked my version of the world more than his, would he try to get rid of me in order to stay?

It was then my mind flooded with all the grotesque ways I could be dispatched by my reflection if he saw fit. After all, how could I be sure if my reflection really knew right from wrong? Did it have a conscience? A soul? Desires? What if my reflection was coming to the same revelations and is now plotting to kill me?

That is when my reflection scared me. I couldn’t keep eye contact with it anymore. Though the eyes in the mirror were my own, I had no idea what dark fantasies lay behind them. This is why I can no longer make intentional eye contact with my reflection to this day.

I have avoided mirrors since my childhood and now have one mirror in my apartment kept in the bathroom for grooming purposes.

Life has been pretty normal otherwise... Until tonight. This night I had awoken from a stressful nightmare.

For me nightmares are common place. I’ve dreamt of falling from great heights, death, snakes, scenes of morbidity, and so on. No nightmare disturbs me more than the ones I have of mirrors.

In the dream I’m in a macabre version of my apartment. The setting is familiar, but at the same time different and unsettling. Before I could realize my dreamscape apartment’s incongruencies to my real one, I came face to face with a mirror... and standing there was my reflection, smiling at me. I found it very disturbing because I knew I wasn’t smiling and if I was, it wouldn’t be the twisted toothy smile my reflection was taunting me with.

Before I could do anything in the dream to shift my attention or drift into a more pleasant scene, my reflection moved. In an instant the reflected me turned around and ran down his reflected world hallway and out of site. It was then I heard a loud sharp bang followed by rushing footsteps. The sudden burst of sound in my dream is what startled me awake.

The dark stillness in my room disturbed me so I thought it best to shake off the eerie calm by moving around and going to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. It was just a dream after all.

I made my way through my apartment toward the bathroom and turned on all the lights as I did so.

When I made it to the bathroom door, I braced myself. Beyond this door was the subject of my nightmare. My reflection. Before opening the barrier, I mentally coached myself to not look at my reflection. Keep it in my periphery. There is no need to be afraid. I’m only going in to splash water on my face and afterwards, maybe I’ll have a lite snack or watch some funny internet videos to calm my nerves.

With my gameplan set, I turned the latch and opened the door. As I flipped the light switch to illuminate the bathroom the dread from my nightmare came rushing back.

When I opened the door, my eyes were fixed on the floor below the sink, but when I turned on the light, right away I knew something was very wrong. Something was missing.

Slowly I looked up toward the mirror. My stomach dropped as my breath caught in my throat. Everything in the mirror was as it should be. My hair stood on end. Something was terribly wrong.

The mirror. Everything was being reflected in the mirror, except... my reflection was not there.

Before I could try to rationalize the sight before me, I heard an all too familiar voice whisper in my ear before it turned off the lights.

“Behind you.”