Seeker

001

“What am I?” I whisper, running my fingertips across the cool surface of the mirror, across the clear reflection of the girl gazing back at me. She’s familiar, the same girl and the same face I see every time I look in a mirror or in a glass window. But I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she was. 

“What am I?” I whisper again, my voice getting louder as the frustration settles back in, growing and growing until I’m clutching at the surface of the mirror, franticly trying to grab hold of the girl inside, to pull her out and shake her loose of the answers I so desperately need… the answers I know she has. Every time I look in the mirror, every time I see my reflection, I feel as though the girl knows, my reflection knows. She knows everything. The secrets and the answers, and she’s taunting me and teasing me, torturing me, forcing me to stay out here, in the real world, to search for answers I most likely will never find.

I’m insane.

For sixteen years I’ve done this. I’ve stood in front of a mirror and just watched myself, looked as far into my eyes as I could, searching for something. Anything. Anything that would give me even a hint to who I am and what I’m capable of. 

But I never find anything. 

It’s frustrating. Day in and day out, I wake up, hoping that today will be different, that maybe today I’ll finally get some answers, something that can help me, something that can make the pain and anger and darkness go away, even a little bit. I never do.

Sometimes, because of this frustration, I fall off the edge. Sometimes I get angry. 

“What am I?!” I scream this time, clawing at the mirror, clawing at the girl who is so familiar, yet still a complete stranger. I didn’t want to see her anymore. I didn’t want to see the world inside this mirror, taunting me. It needed to go away. 

“Kassidy!” I hear a voice screeching loudly from the other side of the bathroom door, then the banging on the hard wood. “What was that?! Open up! Let me in!”

It was Danny. Why was she screaming? What had happened?

“Ah,” I hiss loudly, the pain bringing me back to reality, away from the girl in the mirror. I look down at my hand, searching for the source, looking for the reasoning behind the painful sting in my hand, but all I see is blood covering my pale skin. Then I see the cuts, long gashes running across my knuckles, small shards of glass still stick in the wounds.

“Shit,” I mumble, reaching for the towel hanging on the metal ring. Beneath the towel, spread across the floor is discarded pieces of razor sharp glass, the frame from the mirror laying next to it. 

“What’s going on in there?!” Danny yelled, pounding aimlessly on the locked door. 

“I’m fine,” I assure her, rapping the towel around my bleeding hand. “Just an accident.”

* * *

“April 13th, 2013,” I mumble, drumming my fingers on the cushiony armrest attached to the passenger seat inside Danny’s car. She was sitting beside me, going through her over-sized purse, searching for money for me. I didn’t have time for lunch this morning, I was too busy trying to decide if my hand was bad enough for stitches. Danny said she would take me to the hospital, hell, she works there. It’s not like it would be going out of her way to take me there. I told her it was fine, the cuts weren’t that bad, a couple band-aids would to the trick. Besides, I didn’t want to miss the first day back to school, now, did I?

Sarcasm noted. 

“What did you say?” Danny asks me, pulling out a crisp, purple Canadian ten dollar bill, handing it over to me. I don’t move to take it from her hand, I just continue to stare out my window at the group of four girls standing in a group, giggling and gossiping and complimenting each other on their skin-tight, overly-revealing clothing.