In The Mirror

Living in the mirror, there are two young men. They are woven together, like a strangler fig and its host, and while they support each other in the moment, one will eventually overtake and kill the other.

***

The first is handsome, with fluffy hair that stays miraculously in place, static, as if he were a cartoon character. There is slight stubble on his chin, and a faint blonde mustache, just enough to make him look his age, sixteen. Besides this hint of masculinity, his perfect skin is completely unblemished.

He’s tall, tall enough that his head scrapes the top of the mirror, and though he’s thin he isn’t weak. His chest is flat as a board, and he’s never known it to be any other way. His torso and legs are the correct proportions for a young man, and he’s never considered that, in another world, they might have been any different.

He smiles often, a terribly infectious smile, to everybody but his lifeless eyes, to whom his smile never seems to reach. His eyes are like glittering blue gems, beautiful but inorganic. He’s approachable, the kind of person who could listen without a hint of judgement, even if he never agrees with a word you say. He doesn’t give advice or counsel, doesn’t respond in any meaningful way. He just sits, at a safe distance, nodding solemnly, never proffering even a pat on the shoulder for comfort. Nobody ever takes note of this purposeful detachment, as his very presence is so calming it almost seems like he cares.

You can tell, just by looking at him, that everything in his life will fall perfectly into place. He’ll go to a good college, find a nice girl, settle down with a good job and be happy with it, in his own way. He’s the right kind of ambitious, the kind that gets you money and happiness and stability.

Everyone likes him, you just know it. He’s impossible to dislike, inoffensive and placid like a cardboard cutout, anything and everything anyone could want him to be. It isn’t forced, either, your edges would never need to be sanded down if you were a perfect circle.

***

That’s the young man you see when you look in the mirror and shut your eyes tight. Your eyes have been closed for so long that when you do open them, the edges of your vision are dark and smudged.

***

The second young man is short, not pathetically so but enough to raise suspicion. His face is round and his hair is frizzy and he is anything but perfect. His face is dotted with acne, and he looks at least three years younger than his age. Despite the binder crushing his ribs, he’s barely able to keep up the illusion of a flat chest. His long, slender legs seem to make up at least three fifths of his height, something he is very conscious of.

He slouches when he walks, hands curled in his pockets or running through his hair or clawing at his face. But when he smiles, he means it. His large doe eyes are beautiful but weak, and betray true human emotion. He is so real, so genuine, that it sickens you.

He has opinions, ones that boil over and force him to argue and pout and stutter. He has feelings that contort his face in disgusting, unwanted ways. He has murky, complicated, contradictory thoughts that refuse to give him a solid sense of identity. He is real, and you desperately wish he wasn’t.

He has ambitions, the kind that pile on top of each other until all of them seem unattainable. He wants to write novels, create art, do everything but make money. He wants to make people feel real emotions, he wants to make them laugh, he wants to make them believe in love even if he doesn’t.

He is the only person in the mirror who looks like you, and when you see him there you want to rip him out and pound his soft face to a pulp, so that maybe the next time you open your eyes someone else will be staring back.

***

The two young men in the mirror dance in the flickering light of the powder room, in the fluorescent migraine of the school hallway’s shiny floor, in the puddles that flood the sidewalks of your neighborhood. They grapple for the crown, but neither can win, not the imaginary nor the real, for they are so intertwined that if one fell the other would follow.