Life in the Mirror

The apartment seemed as if it was made just for me. I had a bed and two shelves. The apartment lacked bed and shelves but had everything else - tables, chairs, a sofa. My bed was exactly 1.6 meters in width - and the tiny bedroom a perfect match.

There were two things I didn't like. The first, of course, was the lack of a dedicated bathroom. The shower cabin was in the kitchen and the toilet in a small room off the balcony. The second thing I didn't like was the mirror in the bedroom.

It's not that I don't like mirrors. But in a room just barely big enough for the bed, with walls to all sides, there was something disturbing in having one of the walls as just one large mirror. It felt misplaced and odd like a lone, smiling stranger standing in the middle of a desert road.

The first night I was tired from the move, every muscle in my body seemed to be aching and my body was still sticky and sweating even after two showers and four hours since the last box. Still I first lay awake for two or three hours, rolling from one side to the other and hoping for the salvation of sleep.

When sleep came, rather than a salvation, it turned out to be a horror movie instead. In a pitch black imageless dream I felt myself being pulled apart, squeezed into tiny space, and pulled apart again, over and over again. The dream felt as if it lasted for hours on end. Nothing woke me, nothing in my dream could save me from the darkness stretching and compressing my being in an orchestra of pains I never felt before.

When I woke up in the morning, rolling slowly over to the side, I felt better about the mirror. It felt less threatening and more welcoming. I smiled at my disheveled hair and at my crazy looking eyes. The mirror sat like me, one arm on the bed, the other scratching the head. But my mirror image didn't smile.

In a fraction of a second the world returned to normal. I don't know if I blinked or not, but in that moment my mirror image smiled again.

At night my mirror image behaved normally. I experimented with quick or slow movements, unexpected facial expressions - but all was normal. I taped postcards over part of the mirror.

That night the nightmares came back. They were the same as before, painful darkness with a surreal pulling and stretching and pressing that made my mouth taste like iron. But they felt easier, calmer even. They also didn't seem to last as long.

In the morning I opened my eyes and saw that my mirror image had already opened his. He blinked twice when I didn't. My face must have been filled with shock, his spoke of contempt or exhaustion.

It took longer this time, nearly half a minute. That's when, with one snap that was so sudden that I felt as if I actually heard a snapping sound, my mirror image returned to normal. It mirrored me perfectly, without fault, no matter what things I tried.

That evening I spent an hour taping more postcards and even posters on that mirror.

It didn't help.

The nightmares were less intense. They felt softer the way a ride on a rollercoaster becomes less exciting and threatening the more often you ride it. You learn the bumps and sudden turns, you learn the feeling of something ripping your skin in seventy different directions and the sudden compressions of an elephant stepping on your chest, and somehow it becomes more like a chore than a torture.

In the morning the postcards were ripped down. He was there for nearly ten minutes. I tried to take a picture of him but the reflection that the camera recorded look just like I had looked. While, when I took the picture, he wasn't even standing in front of me anymore. He was walking through the apartment, randomly appearing reflected in the TV, the corridor window and then in the bathroom mirror. I watched from the side as he brushed his teeth. And then, somehow, he saw me.