Strange mirror
This had happened before, but I didn’t think it was important perhaps because the fact was not yet so strange or perhaps the right time to understand what was happening had not yet arrived. I came back from the market carrying bags, distracted from life, thinking about nothing. I stopped in front a mirrored glass clinic. Being a woman, just like my ancestors, I couldn’t resist the temptation to see myself reflected in the glass. I scolded myself for the foolish vanity, but immediately I forgave mysel because I had read in one of these beatiful salon magazines that we always need to be kind to ourselves more than never now in our mature age.
It was strange but in fact I was incredibly similar to my mom, thiner and shorter, it’s true, but without a doubt, it seemed to me to see my mother emerging from the mists of time. I always knew that if women want to know what they will be like in the future it would be enough to look at their mothers. And I really seemed to see my mom from the other side of the mirror. It was not just physically, it was the look, something very vague that escaped the limits of the body. I thought it came from the soul or from the spirit, I didn’t know for sure. It was my mother present in my silhoutte, if her spirit fit perfectly in my wrapper. I laughed from my crazy considerations.
I went to my home full of lonelyness and longing. The memories of my past emerged quickly. I knew it was impossible to let the past in the past because when a small crack is opened, the ghosts arrive almost obscenely, through doors and walls, eager to torment a sensitive and restless mind. At home I looked at myself in the mirror, but I found no trace of my mother’s features, just creases and wrinkles around my eyes and my mouth.
The next day and the others I went back to the mirrored clinic, looking for my mother’s elusive traces. I knew that a simple narcissistic impulse would eventually turn into a compulsion. Then, I realized that I no longer admired myself in the mirror, I just looked for my mom. I coudn’t share that with anyone, it was too insane. Would that be madness after all? If so, I was crazy, definetly crazy. I realized that as I visited that strange mirror, I was, in some way, perfecting my mother’s image. My eyes could see more clearly those features that before were just a sketch, like a painter with each stroke, he completes his picture. And so, each morning I woke eager to se the progress of that image. Obviously I already saw everything as a total madness. But I needed that daily dose of madness.
One night I had the intuition that I shoud not go on with that crazy task of pursuing my mother’s image in the mirrored glass. I gathered all the strenght I still had and I stayed several days withoug going to that street. I fought bravely to win the battle of not succumbing to the crazy desire to see my mother in a mirrored glass door. I understood the difficulty of letting go of an addiction.
After months, as if I had a cigarette just to prove to myself that I wasn’t addicted, I went back to the glass door. I looked confidently with all eyes, but, disappointed I saw only my own image, without any resemblance to my mother’s features. At first I was overcome with great anguish, start to believe that my mother, resentful of my absence was gone from my life forever. Then I settled as we conform to everything. I never looked at myself in that mirrored door again, although desire always turned into temptation and I knew that living was always very difficult.
I had no choice but to try to believe that everything had been nothing but the product of solitude and artifice engendered by my creative and highly influential mind. Well, daughers end up looking like their mothers, isn’t it? But, if it were possible? Madness is like that, it is sweet and sensual, but this time, at least for once in my life, I had an even sweeter certainty: I had saved myself.
