I’m normally okay in the morning. Mornings are usually my strong suite for the whole day. I like watching the sun come up in the morning while I’m lying by my window, a tree waving in the wind with its green leaves. It’s the best view I ever get nowadays. When I was seven and I had to be in that house all the time with my rapist there weren’t any windows. I’d lie there in my bed waiting for the morning to come but I didn’t when that would be. I could hear the rain pattering against the walls, my tears blended with them, but I couldn’t see the stars in the sky or the birds chirping right outside. I could only hear the thunder banging against the house, the violence and the anger seemed to shake everything, and I thought it was me God was angry with, always me.
“Hello Violet”.
I knew I had to be having another hallucination, or I was still asleep in my bed. Those were the only two explanations for why my reflection, the girl I saw in the mirror and who only ever looked at me with disappoint and scowls, was now talking to me, when I had my mouth shut.
I put down the brush and just stared at the smile that the young woman had on her face, the one that couldn’t possibly be me. Why was it whenever I saw my reflection, whether it was past or present me, she always had to be smiling.
“If your going to tell me something I don’t want to hear, then save your breath”, I kept pretending to put on mascara and not care, but I couldn’t even see what I was doing with her smug little grin in front of me, and anywhere else I looked in the large mirror all I saw was emptiness, perhaps symbolizing the emptiness of my heart.
“How would you know what I’m going to say? You can read minds”.
“I know that, but you’re me. I don’t have to read my own mind”.
The girl in the mirror laughed a little, “Well, I think you do”.
I felt an urge to slam down the mascara brush but I held firm to the little ounce of sanity that I was desperately clinging to by a thread (that thread being that I knew this was a hallucination).
“You’re wrong. Why don’t you just shut up and let me finish getting ready for school?”
She folded her arms across her chest and sighed, “You can’t keep avoiding your problems, Violet. You’re going to have to look me in the eye one way or another. I know you don’t want too, you think of yourself as a monster, afraid of your own shadow even because even that is casting the judgment of the person you really are”.
I just blinked at the girl, so sure of herself, arms crossed over her chest, twinkle in her eyes. She wanted to get to me, wanted me to debate back and forth with her until I finally erupted in a psychotic break, yelling at myself, that’s how these tend to happen”.
“You’re right about everything, what point are you trying to prove?”
“You are not Schizophrenic”.
I sucked in my breath, “What would make you think i think that?”
She laughed softly, “I’m you, remember? Think of this is your innermost thoughts talking straight to you, desperately needing to get out of the part of the brain that’s stuffing them away”.
It was my turn to laugh, “I think you just disproved your own theory, what part of that didn’t sound schizophrenic to you? I hallucinate myself as a child, my novel characters, fictional little girls I’m afraid could have been hurt just like me, I hear my rapists voice telling me to hurt myself. Don’t tell me nothing is wrong”.
“I didn’t say nothing is wrong. I said you’re not schizophrenic. What if this is what grieving is, what if these are just symptoms of guilt and loneliness. What if this is just God trying to tell you that you are as normal as your ever going to be?”
I shook my head, “Great, my mirror is going to teach me about God now. Go ahead, enlighten me, mirror mirror on the wall”.
“Fine, cover up your feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred with comical relief. I’m not going to lecture you Violet, you believe whatever it is you want to believe. I just know that you don’t need to be scared you have this disease, God wouldn’t be that cruel”.
“Yes, he would”.
“Stop it, Violet. The world isn’t as bad a place as you think, you’re mind isn’t as dark a place as you think. There was laughter and joy and hugs and kisses and friends in there once, there was thoughts of being a mother and getting your dream job, when did going crazy become part of this life plan?”
“So you admit it, you do think I’m crazy”.
My reflection winked, “Mirror mirror on the wall, whose the craziest of them all?”
Then she was gone.