I was made of jewels, rubies poured from my wrists making their way down my fingers to pool on the ground at my feet, diamonds dusted my cheeks; glistened in my eyes. The constant drip was rhythmi, and sometimes I swore it was the only thing that kept me sane. Although, sanity, that's a funny thing; very relative. What is sanity really? I am sane, or is she. Me, or the girl on the other side of the glass. She looks like me, thinks like me, breathes like me. To the onlooker we would appear the same. Same glowing red hair, porcelain skin marred by the freckles she so dearly hated, and her hands; soft and kind. But there was a difference, it lay in the eyes. She was a doll. Azure eyes like ice, she smiled, but yet it never reached them. They never warmed, not once. They lay there in her skull glazed over with fanciful patterns of frost, the only beauty left. Dead as the middle of winter's night.
The night she appeared before me again, my doppelganger. She gazed into the glass into my eyes. I yearned to race forward, to beat my hands against the glass as I had countless times before. Time had become fluid in the confines of the mirror. I may have been in here for a month, a year, and yet it felt like a millennium. It was cold, dark, and barren. The only source of light coming from beyond the reflective glass. Beyond her.
I've begun to forget how I got here, but from what I can remember it was tragically simple. I remember being her. My smile, genuine, spreading across my lips like flowers in spring; my laugh as contagious as the common hay fever; floating from person to person on the whims of the wind. My eyes would shine with the light of a thousand stars and it would bleed from me, filling a room. That's what they always loved, and always took for granted.
Finally the darkness began to close in. Pressing down upon my lungs, my heart, and mind until they screamed out for mercy. It was like a black hole opening up inside my chest crushing me from the inside out. It was agonizing. Escape was place in front of me. Tantalizingly, it sat there simple; easy. But was it worth the loss. I guess we all know the answer.
She reached inside, grabbed my bloody and battered hand. She wiped away my tears and calmed my wailing. She promised me a better, easier life, all I had to do was trust her. Hope glimmered in my eyes, and I tightened my grip until my fingers were white with the effort. She gazed into my eyes. My eyes resembled cracked and broken glass shards still pouring down my face. I looked into her, drawing out the depths of what ever soul she had left. And I whispered one last message. At first it confused her, I knew she expected me to scream and beg, but I did nothing of the sort. In an almost frigidly steady voice she said "Promise me one thing," I nodded my head tentatively, my curiosity overtaking my better judgment, "remember me." I took a shaky breath and nodded. Her eyes searched mine for some sort of affirmation that she was doing the right thing, but none came. I took a step back and fell into the mirror. The glass rippled and swallowed me form before she could scream for me to come back. The fear hit her, maybe she was wrong, but it was all too late and she, I, what ever we are, were that is, was gone.
I'm trapped for an eternity in the confines of her soul; caged in the iron bars of her heart.
I gazed into the eyes of my twin, dead and cold as the grave of a 1300 year old skeleton. And in that moment I realized the mistake I'd helped her make. She would never live again, that night she trapped me; I died and she was left a hollow empty shell. We both died that night. My sacrifice cost her everything. So yet again I begun the mantra of shouting and screaming until my throat tore in half and blood filled my lungs relieving me of my suffering. Beating on the glass like a drum until my hand shattered so much like the glass I so desperately wished to break.
And yet still she smiled, it was gruesome like the splitting of a wound. Spiritless eyes turned away. I broke down in a smattering of tears and screams.
I am the girl make of jewels, diamonds in my eyes, rubies adorning my hands, but with a heart was made of glass, scattered in pieces around my feet. Millions of pieces shining in the sunless sky like so many lost stars. And finally it occurred to me. Death, like mine was beautiful, for now, locked inside the mirror I could dance among the stars. For what is beauty without pain.
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Strange and convoluted as this story may be, I beg that you take it heart. It isn't a story about a girl trapped in a mirror, it's a story about a girl that spent so much time looking inward and trusting no one that she let herself fall away into oblivion. No matter how hard or long the road may seem to never give up, the moment you do you lose a piece of yourself. The price is too high to pay no matter what. Fight until you're bruised and broken, pick yourself up and raise your fists because, honey you're worth it whether you think so or not.
