She called herself a broken mirror because she thought it would be easier for me to understand that way. She said each fragment was a different size and colour but together they made the whole. Whichever piece you looked into was the piece you would see.
She kept the non-metaphors from me; the way the shards liked to fight each other inside her mind. It was impossible for her to make up her own mind, because they were her mind, but they always disagreed.
I asked her what her family was like. It was sane. She lived a good life with parents who fought. Although she asked more about me. While she had forty-seven identities I barely had my own. While she was cross-stitching herself to make up her mind, I had no mind. I had no thought when I sold her my lips.
I let her have my tongue. I never knew why I wanted to speak so badly. I spoke up for her because she was too scared to speak for herself. I sold her my body, which I now regret, and one day I sold her my mind.
Three bottles of pills were wasted on her small body. She came back though, crying because one of her identities tried to murder the rest. We have a word for that now, though I hate to call her it; crazy, because that's what she was, and that's what they wrote on her board when she was admitted. Mentally Unstable, Possible Dissociative Identity.
"We're not crazy," she begged. Later that week she said the youngest fought the other two from slitting her wrists, but across her neck was a large cut. "We decided to go here instead."
I didn't sleep for weeks straight. She was crazy, in a way I wouldn't never experience, and I was the one who chose her.
One night at two I woke her up slowly and said, "You have to go."
She didn't understand. "Which one?"
"All of you. Please, go. I can't do this anymore." She sat up from bed as tears ran from her eyes, "It's fine, because the one who loved you killed herself all ready." I knew she meant the pills but I couldn't understand. I'll admit I hit her and threw her outside, even though she kept quiet through all that.
"I'm sorry," I said.
She left, and that was my second mistake. My hands were clenched around the phone faster than I could have ran after her. The police move faster at night, I concluded, but they found her too late. I didn't recognize the silhouette. I knew it was one of the shards of the mirror pressing deep into her skin but not deep enough to draw any blood. I knew she was crying because I knew she didn't want this.
No one would believe me.
She wasn't a shattered mirror. Mirrors don't shatter until you break them, and she was broken long before I knew. Bodies shatter when they hit the concrete sidewalk, but they're not the only ones breaking.
