The Woman in the Mirror

Looking at herself in the mirror, she saw a strangely unfamiliar face. It was her. This was her face and body. How could she not recognize herself? She touched her cheeks and made a funny and a sad face.

She wiped off her tears, closed her eyes for one second and tried to think about nothing. It was probably the longest one second of her life. It felt as though she was stuck in a dark tunnel with many trucks, cars, buses and motorcycles that were fast approaching her. She even got hit by a few. Every time she got hit, she felt dead, but she was still alive. In this darkness, many familiar voices were talking at her. They were all talking and screaming together. She covered her ears and with her eyes watched another truck hit her. The driver of the truck looked outside the window and laughed at her while driving away.

She opened her eyes. Everything was still the same. There was a room confined in the frame of a mirror. And there was her. She still did not recognize herself. The mirror only triggered her memories of others, but not of herself. She closely examined her smile in the mirror. She vaguely remembered the smile; but not as her own smile. It felt as though it was someone else’s smile. Her skin was burning under her sour tears.

There she was again: this woman...this stranger...this butterfly...this woman that was stuck somewhere between a dense past and an indefinite future. She shivered. The stranger woman shivered with her.

She did not know or recognize her. She touched her cheeks again and blew herself a kiss. She, then, smiled. Perhaps it did not matter that she did not remember, recognize or know herself. Perhaps what mattered was that she could refer to this strangely unfamiliar woman that was staring at her from within as "herself ".

She looked in the mirror again. There she was. Herself. She was not alone.

The woman in the mirror winked at her. Then, a voice whispered in her ear, “Don’t you worry. I’ve got your back!”

And the world resumed to silence. The world turned into an infinite vacuum of people and places.

The woman in the mirror blew her a kiss and walked away to stand in the middle of that dark tunnel, ready for all those belligerent cars and voices of the past to hit her hard and watch her not die.