Shattered Picture’s
“You love me, don’t you”?, Gaby asks as she stares blindly at her reflection in the opaque mirror.
The reflection staring back at her, lovingly softened the lines around her eyes. The lines put there by the thoughtless aquaintance of time, the lines were refined by the globs of cosmetics Gaby wore as filler, plumping outward the creases that needed additions daily.
The gaze of the mirror staring back at her had a perplexed glitter in its depth, as if asking Gaby, whether it was speaking to it.
Silence, bounced off the argent surface of the mirror. Always well behaved the mirror knew its place, hanging on the wall, as a well behaved child, seen but never heard.
Gaby, listened to the smooth lines, refusing to detect the arythimic undertone beneath the surface. Silence was the only friend she ever allowed to speak its mind.
Who did she expect to answer her, thought the mirror, the image cowering behind the mirror, perhaps?
Gaby, mesmerized by her reflection, turns her face to the left and to the right and back again, illiterately reading the lines sketched on its surface. She swivels her head again for good measure and impetuously decides to ignore the fine print. The details in plain view. She rereads the same chapter everyday before placing the book down for the night, missing the placement of the a-vowels, she begins her ritualized escape to dreamland.
Every night the mirror confounded stares back at Gaby, trying to forstall the inevitable but Gaby, refuses to face the image before her.
The mirror, this night concerned flashes her signs — signs refracting outward from the flashing lights pouring in through the window.
Gaby, startled by the intrusion, anxiously begins to croon, “You love me, don’t you, tell me you love me”!
The mirror, her truest friend, who Gaby continuously disregards — flashes revealing an image that shatters Gaby’s beveled heart of glass.
Gaby, in denial faces off against her friend — vindictively, throwing off her true face — her penetratingly grotesque gaze, shatters the true beauty in the mirror.
The mirror, honest cries, the shattered pieces tears — she tries to glue the friendship back but to no avail.
Gaby, incognito — inconspicuously, with head bent and hunched over, glances at the passersby on street, not wanting to be seen, she enters an antique shop one town over from her own, the shop softly lit for its ambience, accommodates her disposition.
Gaby, rudely ignoring the store owner heads towards the back of the store where all the mirrors were hung on display, ignoring the worthless sale tags, that dangled from them — price was of no importance at this point.
She moves from one mirror to the other, staring at them curiously. She stares into each mirror in turn searching for a fit to accommodate the now empty space in her walled heart.
She finally halts before an antique mirror, circa 1800’s, the beveled glass aphotic with lines delineated appropriately for its age marring the otherwise clear surface. Swaying her head to and fro, Gaby, gazes into the mirror repeatedly. The lines in the aged mirror all the cosmetics she needs this day.
“You, love me don’t you”, whisperingly she asks the mirror, as the shopkeeper stares at her in bewildered bemusement.
Through the grooved lines of the mirror, she hears a timid voice, an image from the past surfacing, reaching through the years, whisperingly it replies, “I do”.
Gaby, satisfied turns to the shopkeeper, her decision set in stone,
“I’ll take this one, wrap her up”.
The image, the illusion, in the mirror staring back at her adoringly, the projection of a long ago memory she had captured, a perpetual snapshot she had framed within the deceptive borders of her mind.
Gaby’s shattered picture, of the inevitable she fears to face.
Copyright ©. R Tsambounieri Talarantas. Nov 6, 2019. All Rights Reserved.