Chapter 2.3 - Reflections

We accept as truth that a reflection is just a virtual copy of reality, but it is so much more than that. A reflection is a blend, a superimposition of the image that is cast on the medium it’s cast upon. The resulting picture is a little bit of real, though backwards, seeded within the substance of the surface of reflection itself: if it be water it embraces its fluidity and restless motion, if it be glass, its ethereal nature and its appearance of almost not being there, if it be mirror, the sharp shifts of quick silver. 

That is also true of elements we don’t usually conceive of as a reflecting medium; for instance we don’t see the reflections we cast on other people, but they are always there. In every interaction there is a little bit of us mixed with the glut of their personality, intellect and emotions. This is why it is impossible to fully know a person: you can never see them without the influence of your own personality projected on theirs.

The most subtle reflections are those we cast on our surroundings, on the larger life with which we constantly exchange breath and of which we are an inextricable part. Even in perfect stillness we move the world just by being in it. Our emotions, like water, like glass, like quick silver, warp the essence of what’s there from one moment to the next, turning hell into heaven and back at the drop of a hat. They make us hate sunshine in May and crave November mists, they make us perceive things as beautiful or ugly in ways nobody else can see, they literally recreate our world one feeling at a time. 

The stoic ones, the cerebral types, the down to earth realists, dismiss this as ignorant nonsense, the work of lesser minds, incapable of higher reason. They take the unchanging nature of reality on faith and center themselves in its absolute truth even as reality bends itself out of shape to validate their beliefs.

In a very practical way we live in worlds of our own making, which are constantly influenced by interference from the lives of others, but whose very essence only we can change, just like an ocean that is endlessly moved by waves, eddies and currents, but never ceases to be an ocean. 

Anyway, back to the mirrors. There is something disquieting about standing between parallel mirrors. It feels like you’re being sucked in one reflection at a time into a world with no depth that looks just like the one you live in, but it’s not. Your being is split between the right side and the left, and for a brief but very confusing moment, there are two yous staring you back, infinitely bouncing off the mirrors so you can’t tell which one is which anymore. If you look carefully into the distance you will see their vantage point changing, as if those infinite worlds in the mirror had experienced a small but noticeable shift and they’re different now, and you instinctively know that once you come out of this tunneling of reality, your world won’t be the same either.

Give a curious and obstinate person a piece of reality which seems to be peeling at a corner and they’ll pick at its thin film until they remove it altogether, especially after they’ve been repeatedly prompted not to. Who can resist a command, albeit expressed in the negative, that has been drilled into one’s head for twenty years? Commands and prohibitions are two faces of the same coin: they both work to focus one’s attention and heighten one’s emotional response to their subject and whether that is done in a positive or a negative way their effectiveness is diabolically similar.

Very early in the morning, before dawn started shedding its blue and purple hues, Claire sneaked down the stairs, quiet as a mouse and trying very hard to calm her rogue heart. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was afraid, she didn’t even want to think it, but her body couldn’t dissimulate the waves of anxiety that coursed through her veins and made her breathing quick and shallow. When she reached the large hallway she felt the air suddenly grow colder, despite the sweltering temperatures outside. Its density was different too and she could feel the static charge against her skin that gave her goose bumps and played with her hair.  All the constricted blood flow that had made her hands and feet tingle and her chin go numb was suddenly released and rushed to her cheeks.

“Claire,” she told herself, “maybe this is not a bad time to turn around and go back to bed.” A recalcitrant component of her personality intervened immediately, pushing her past the edges of the mirrors and into the entryway. “Great,” Claire mumbled through her teeth, “It’s too late already!” 

Because of her grandmother’s continuous warnings to stay out of the doorway so she wouldn’t block traffic, she half expected a swarm of people to ambush her on their way to wherever they had to be, but the mirrors were quietly displaying an exact replica of her current state.

“What else did you think you were going to see, dummy?” she scolded herself quietly, while she gathered the wit to get closer to one of the mirrors and stare at the infinite reflections of her. They all had the same terrified look on their faces, and Claire made a note to remember how easily one could read emotions on her face: her eyes looked glossy, widened with apprehension, and reflected the vague patterns in her mind, the kind one couldn’t describe rationally but could feel without a doubt, in their tiny domed mirrors. It was in their reflection, and not in the mirrors themselves, that Claire got her surprise for the day, because right there, in the endless row of eyes that stretched into the distance, she saw herself with flowers in her hair, smiling broadly at something she could not see, but which seemed to be right behind her.

“Holy Grace!” she jumped back, almost against her will, and she could swear she bumped into something solid in the process. She looked behind herself, but there was nothing there other than the first rays of sun which had finally managed to pierce the veil of dawn.