Thursday, October 9, 2008
The spell of the mirrors...
Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors…
I am standing in a room, full of mirrors. The room has the classic-cube shape, with the walls covered in mirrors. I can neither find the door, nor remember how I entered this room in the first place. It’s as if I was brought here when I was asleep, or even maybe born here, but never noticed the mirrors. Whatever the reason, I am now surrounded by mirrors.
They are somehow different from my memory of a regular mirror, which should naturally reflect my own image. In each, I can see my own image, but somehow changed, tiltled, alternated. Thank god they are not scary, or too fat, or too thin, or bald! They are just…how to say it…different.
In every mirror, there is a me. Cooking in a kitchen, typing behind a computer, marking some papers in a classroom, feeding a baby, waiting in a long queue for a bus, in the middle of a conversation, shouting and waving hands (this one seems angry!), trapped in traffic, sitting in a cottage looking at the flowers, in the middle of a party…
As soon as I look at each one of them in their mirrors, they pause whatever it was they were doing, look up, and stare back at me through their mirrors, seemingly deep in thought, and then back to whatever it was they were doing…
OK, now it’s getting a bit scary. I have missed the sense of which one is the real me, and if I don’t focus on myself, I can mistake myself with any of the other reflections in the mirrors. They can all be me, and yet I am myself. I am the one who is looking at all of these mirrors, freaking out. I should leave this room. I cannot recognize myself in any of them, and yet, they all look familiar. The thing is they are not necessarily “me” who chose any other path on the way. Some of the reflections, I have no idea where they are coming from…I’m freaking out. I should leave this room.
I walk around, touching each mirror. They are solid. They don’t move. There is no button or key around any of them. I try to break them, they don't break. I’m frightened, lost, frustrated, desperate. I sit, close my eyes, and lie down. Maybe this is a dream, a nightmare, and I can end it by opening my eyes. Let’s count to ten; one, two, three,…
Opening my eyes, I am still in the same room, with all the mirrors and all my reflections. But there is some hope. Looking up, I see the ceiling. There is no reflection in the ceiling. Just the sky, bright and blue; and the clouds, puffy and white. Maybe there is an escape after all. I take whatever I can find in the room, piling them on top of each other, making a tower to go up toward the ceiling. My hands are scrached and my back hurts, but I am going up, up, up… and then to the ceiling. It’s made of glass, but I take one of my heaviest books and hit it hard…so hard that it breaks with a loud crack, and the glass sparkles around everywhere. A nice breeze blows in. Finally! I grab myself up the side, and look outside…
Everywhere is filled with cubes, covered in glass and mirrors. Every mirror is a wall between each two rooms. The life is going on in each room, reflecting in some mirrors, and observing other reflection of it’s own. Each image is slightly similar, and slightly different from the other reflections. Every now and then, in each cube, people pause, look up, stare for a couple of moment into the mirrors, and go back to their lives. Apparently this was not a nightmare afterall, it was the life itself...
And I’m on the top of the roof, looking at the infinite number of the cubes, and amazed by so many different reflections, so similar; yet so different…I’m not scared anymore.
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