Mirror Imaging

As I neared the age of nine I began to not only dislike mirrors but the reflection as well. It always seemed wrong some how. It didnt match what I thought I would, should look like. At the age of eleven I started covering my mirror with a plain black towel. Whenever I was near a reflective service I always thought I could see strange shadows in them. I told my mother and she just chalked it up to hair and an overactive imagination.

As I got older the shadows became more and more common. They got bigger and nastier. And they wouldnt always wish away when I turned to look, they would linger for just a moment and then vanish. In the stead of the shadow monsters would be my own twisted face. It looked scarred and deformed in the reflection. I would feel my face compulsively. My face was smooth save a few pimples, my nose wasn’t crooked or swollen or three inches too far to the right. My lips were normal not non-existent. My eyes felt like they were uniform shapes under my eyelids.

I would tell my mother of how my reflection looked and she would give me a worried look and say that my eyes were tricking me. She would take pictures of me with her digital camera and show me that I looked like normal girl, in the pictures I looked the same as my reflection. In 10th grade a friend of mine got a Polaroid camera and she would snap away on that thing endlessly. She took a picture of me despite my protests.
The picture showed my deformed face yet surrounding me was dark, swirling shadow despite the bright sun. The shadows looked like the shadows I’d only ever seen from the corner of my eye. I showed the picture to her begging her to tell me she saw the shadows too. She gave me a worried look just like my mother would have and tried to re-assure me that the picture was of a pretty girl on a sunny day.

At the end of junior year is when it got really bad. My mirror started leaking black, oily, sludge eeked it’s way out of the corners. The towel that covered the glass was slick with it. I gagged and rushed out of the room, every mirror, every shard of glass in the house was leaking this awful liquid. I cried for my mother and a voice like tar replied “She can’t help you here. No one can.”
I screamed so loud my ears popped. My mother came running, she was covered in the foul blackness but she couldn’t see it. She cried with me she was so confused, I can’t blame her, I was a mess.

She took me to doctors after that and of course they found nothing wrong. For months it was nothing but appointments and prescriptions. I took the pills, I used the coping skills, and for months nothing changed. I tried, I really tried but oily sludge still permeated the space. That terrifying voice spoke more and more to me, whispering threats and shouting insults. The shadows got braver too, I could see them in the shine of the sludge covering my walls and the distortion of my face only grew.

In a fit of stupidity two months later I broke, I yelled at the shadows to just take me and be done with it. They replied in a sickening chorus with the Tar Man at the highest pitch with “We don’t want you in here, we want to be taken out by you.” I didn’t speak for a year after that.

It was no longer just the Tar Man who spoke to me, it was all of them in some raucous chorus. Shouting, screaming at me to take them out, to play with them, to console them. Everywhere I went they followed. My room was the worst, I avoided it for months. But as time wore on, they broke me down. I would gaze into my wretched reflection for hours, studying it, watching it move and morph. I found beauty in it again. I listened to the shadows scream, and could soon discern separate entities. I found a dying beauty in this viscous space. I let the screams subdue me, the leaking walls engulf me, I became a shadow myself. And after years of fighting tooth and nail against it, I let the shadows out.

They came in a rush, like a tsunami, and I was one with them. It was exhilarating, I’ll never find that high again. I thought that with them free that my mother would finally see, but she couldn’t, no one could. All she could see was me and my dark swimming eyes. I thought something more would happen with the shadows out but I was wrong, the press of them was just felt more. I felt constantly surrounded by joyous noise and wonderous wet warmth. I still feel that way, I hope it never stops.