Elena looks in the mirror and practices her smile.
Today will be different, she knows it. She's had over three months to be sad and depressed over the death of her parents, but now she can't do that anymore. People have moved on and there's only so long she's allowed to be the sad little girl who lost her parents.
Jeremy needs her, Jenna needs her and Bonnie and Caroline have been looking at her strangely recently. Elena knows it's gone on long enough and she needs to be there for them like she used to.
She's fine, thank you, and no one seems to question it.
(It doesn't matter that getting out of bed is the hardest thing she does each day or sometimes the pain is so great that it consumes her. Elena needs to be fine, so she is).
Now, she looks in a different mirror (her own mirror is in the ashes of her family home) and practices a blank face.
She doesn't care anymore. Jeremy no longer matters and neither does being okay for her friends. Because there's no one left and nothing matters anymore.
She's in the dirty bathroom of a diner somewhere in Pennsylvania, putting on someone else's face so she can become Katherine. It's just another mask that Elena slips into, one of the many she's needed to use since her parent's died.
She puts on too much eyeliner and lipstick much darker than she usually does and looks directly at herself. She doesn't see Elena Gilbert, gloomy graveyard girl, or Elena Gilbert the girl who died in the water. But she doesn't see Katherine either. This girl in the mirror is foreign, parts cold and constructed, but parts resembling the girl who died with Jeremy. She's a patchwork of her old selves and Elena does all she can to cover it up.
She says "I don't care, I don't feel anything," and for a second she almost believes it.
She doesn't care anymore and no one seems to question it.
(It doesn't matter that there's an empty hole inside of her and that whenever she thinks of her brother her mind screams with agony. Elena needs not to care, so she doesn't.)