Chapter 3.4 - Meeting the Shadow

“What on earth is that?” Claire asked herself while she got closer to the mirror to examine the strange way light seemed to bend around  her reflection, held at a distance from her body. A fleeting shadow moved quickly out of the corner of her eye and she tried to follow it in the mirrors, but it kept jumping around, playful, too fast for her to keep up with it.

There is no perfect time for one to meet one’s shadow, just like there is no perfect time to bring a child into the world, or to follow one’s dream. The moment comes when it comes, often when you least expect it, and you have to adjust to it without notice and hope that you don’t drown when you get pushed into the deep end of the pool.

Claire could feel its essence, curious and innocent like a child’s, quietly watching her moves. It wound around her shoulders and then disappeared quickly, hiding in her peripheral field of vision to observe her from there with the single-minded scrutiny of a cat.

The endearing thing about the shadow is that, like all creatures of the wilderness, it is completely guileless. It has no ulterior motives, it doesn’t dwell on resentment, it’s not good, it’s not evil, it just is, like nature, universal laws or life. 

It lives so deep beneath thoughts that it doesn’t get touched by reality at all, it doesn’t learn the social conventions and the acceptable behaviors that so nicely wrap all of us into cute little packages, all the same, fit to belong wherever we’re placed. It just hides and watches everything and keeps track of all the things you don’t want to admit to yourself, the secret desires, the quiet disappointments, the unacknowledged fears.

This game of hide and seek in the mirrors really got to Claire and in her stubbornness she drew closer and closer to the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the elusive fiend before it disappeared. There was something inside of it, she just knew it, something valuable that she might have been able to bring out if only she managed to keep it still and in focus for a few seconds. 

She tried to catch it unaware but the shadow jumped quickly from reflection to reflection, hiding deeper and deeper inside the mirrors until she couldn’t see it anymore. 

Claire had this feeling of being watched and at the same time of watching herself from outside, like she was in the presence of something that shook loose the truth we all try so hard to run from, that is there is no safety and there are no physical boundaries, that our thoughts and feelings are the only things keeping the mirage of existence in place. 

That presence knew her better than anybody in the world, it knew her better than she knew herself. It didn’t judge her, it didn’t hold resentment and it didn’t hurry. The warmth and relief of being unconditionally accepted was so overpowering everything in the real world suddenly lost importance. She gazed at all her worries, plans, hopes and disappointments as if from very far away and they all looked fake and hollow, a menagerie filled with paper tigers. 

It seemed so close, that truth that she intuited, it was right there, within reach, all she had to do was stretch out her hand and touch it. If she touched it she was sure she would have the answers to all those quiet yearnings that churned inside her mind and made her run around in circles for no reason. If only she could grasp that elusive substance, but she could not, because it was safely tucked behind the glass, behind the trappings of illusion. 

Even so, it didn’t mock her, it just followed her movements from the other side of the mirror and Claire could feel its sadness and its frustration for not being able to help. She placed her hand against the glass anyway in an attempt to make a connection through its hard surface, if only a visual one. An unexpected draft unsettled her hair and brushed it off her forehead and a soft weight, warm and comforting like a blanket, settled on her shoulders and made her shrug and cross her arms on her chest, as if to prevent it from falling.

“Claire!” Grandmother’s panicked scream ripped her from her looking glass world and made her turn around, startled. She didn’t have to ask what the reason for the panic was, she could see in her grandmother’s eyes that the gentle weight she felt on her shoulders was still there for all to behold. “Come, child, come down from there, it’s not safe,” the former tried to guide her granddaughter down the shallow step into the parlor, unsettled to encounter resistance. 

“No,” Claire protested, like in a dream. 

“Claire, there are things you don’t understand, you can’t be here, they’ll come for you,” Grandmother pulled harder on her arm. “Get out of the doorway!”

“Who is ‘they’, maman?” she continued in the same ethereal voice.

“The other world,” Grandmother answered, more and more agitated. “Please, child, don’t leave us! Don’t go with them!”

“Leave you?” Claire asked surprised. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the tall man in the reflection, but when she turned around to meet his image straight on she found nothing there. “Why do you say that?”

“Trust me when I tell you, whatever you think you’re going to find in there is not going to be good for you; it’s not for us, their world, we lose ourselves in it, don’t go with them, please come back.”

Claire stepped into the parlor reluctantly, like one wakes up from a dream which shakes one to the core but quickly fades away as consciousness returns.

“Oh, thank God!” Grandmother breathed a sigh of relief and Claire couldn’t help notice that the old lady’s hands were shaking. 

They didn’t talk about it for the remainder of the evening and got ready for dinner as they did every day, but Claire’s soul was still in the mirrors, with the shadow wrapped around it like a shawl.