Introduction: Mirrors
For D.
Because you'll never know.
There's a piece of all of us that wonders if any of it is real, what we observe in life. The laughter of children and the labored breathing of the elderly; the soft bottom lip of that one person and the upturned nose of that other one; the cold feeling of a knife resting in the palm of your right hand and the warm feeling of a smooth cheek flush against the palm your left…
We look to mirrors for the answers, have you noticed?
In the mornings when we press the razor to the flesh of our necks or trace the cosmetics brush across our cheekbones, we ask the mirrors. We glimpse ourselves then, staring back from behind the glass, and we wonder how we really feel. We wonder if the fluorine resting on our toothbrush will really whiten our teeth and if it's worth the barefoot trek across the cold wooden floor of the bedroom to the chest-of-drawers for socks.
It'll be better than yesterday, we tell ourselves. Today will be better.
When we come home in the evenings and wearily hang our cloaks on the hook by the door, running our hands over our faces, feeling the sandpapery stubble that's had all day to grow or the caked make-up that's had all day to absorb the oil from our pores, we look to mirrors. Always we look ghastly, the events of the day settling around us like a thin, viscous sheet of oil and painting dark circles beneath our eyes, flattening our hair to our foreheads in greasy sections or pulling tendrils from their clips and clinging to them like dew so that they frizz out and encircle our heads in a tangled halo of lethargy.
We turn the tap towards the little blue dot, cupping our hands beneath the cold water and splashing it over our faces. Opening our lungs in a gasp, we let the cold rivulets stream down our faces like water down the sides of a glass pouring-pitcher and trickle off our parted lips and the tips of our eyelashes and the ends of our trembling chins, and we try not to remember how redundant this all seems.
We hesitate for only a moment before we lift our heads slowly to stare at the wet hair framing our faces and the jaded eyes beneath half-hanging lids. We see a flash of something unbridled in our own irises and, for a moment, we wonder if we've finally found the answer.
But we blink and feel the droplets trickling down our necks and clinging to the underside of our stiff collars or the lacy edge of our undergarments, spreading out on the fabric like flower blossoms in fast time, and we are reminded that we are on the wrong side of the mirror. We press our foreheads against the cool glass and sigh.
Today will be better, we tell the fog of our breath. Tomorrow will be better.
We look away before we see the ones who would tell us we were wrong. There are four of them, two of each, and they are standing behind the looking glass, staring at us from the corners of our irises, the edges of our pupils, smirking.
They know. They know we shouldn't lie just because the truth makes us doubt.
We don't realize it, but we envy them.
A/N: I know, a prologue and and introduction? I never said this was a conventional sort of deal...
Next chapter starts answers Who questions...
-h