Instructions for Self-Reflection

(976 words)

The trick is to never look your mirrorself dead in the eye. The trick is to miss the mark by slight angles—to speak and act in fractionally incorrect ways. Never, for instance, smile your identical smiles at the same instant on either side of the silvered glass. Never acknowledge any accident of timing that leads you to stretch or yawn just as she does the same. Never let yourself think for a second that you’re looking at your own reflection.

Neither of you should want to destabilize the mirror. Neither of you should be in any way confused or upset about being you (about being the you that you are).

There is an ocean of silver between how you should feel and how you do feel.

Never give ground. Never admit to working at the coffee shop that, in her world, on her side of the mirror, is her favorite daily splurge. She treats you like a little sister, which (on some level) repulses you. You’re two sides of the same coin. You’re the same person in different circumstances. If you met her gaze and reached through the mirror, you could touch the locks of her flawless hair. You should never, of course, do this.

Never let her see your bitterness. The trick is to keep it to yourself. When she tells you she’s going out to a nice restaurant, save that sour envy under your tongue for a rainy day. All you can do is nod along. Smile back. Walk to work. Flirt with the regulars if you want to pay rent this month. When your coworker complains about his own mirrorself getting a promotion over on the other side, you might grimace in shared spite, but never tell him what you’ve imagined. What you contain.

You can be resentful later, you can shudder and vomit, you can pinch your arms and slam your fists into your thighs and bite your tongue. You can bruise and you can be bruised.

When your mirrorself is late to your weekly meeting, when you find yourself staring into an empty silvery space where your face should be (where a more put-together version of your face should be), hold that frustration in. Do not grimace at its vinegar burn. When she stumbles into frame, finally, saying she thinks this latest boy might be the one, force yourself to smile. You can’t afford to date right now. You can barely afford breakfast. She’ll ask you if you’ve tried this one expensive conditioner that works great for her curly hair (for both of your curly hair)—do not remind her that she asked you this last month. Smile.

You don’t want to scare her away.

Never forget that this is supposed to be helpful for both of you. For her, something between sisterhood and charity: a way to offer advice to a worse-off version of herself and be thankful for her good fortune. For you, aspiration: a way to see the version of yourself that had no trouble finding a job after college, a you that goes on dates and drinks rosé and has light brown ringlets that she claims she’s never dyed (and why would she lie to her mirrorself?). But that aspiration is rotting, and the trick is to resist giving in to its metastasizing corruption.

It’s the roiling burn in your stomach when you go to work sick because the alternative is getting fired. The pressure building behind your eyes when your mirrorself moves into a luxury apartment in Hyde Park. It’s the venom you feel when you get catcalled walking home after your late shift, when you shout back at the car as it speeds away into the night, when you clutch your little plastic self-defense keychain so hard your hand bleeds. Like you could scream until your lungs were raw; like there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to someone who deserved it.

So easy to give token resistance to your own impulses. Tell yourself you’re fighting these incubating urges. Convince yourself that this is what self-control is, that tamping these thoughts down is all that you can do.

The trick is to let yourself believe that it’s impossible, right up until the last moment.

You’ll lean in close and smile as your reflection does. Meet your mirrorself’s eyes dead-on for the first time (they’re the same green as yours, and they’re widening in surprise). Reach through the silver, cold and bracing, and grab hold of her brunette locks.

Pull with all your might. Don’t let her wriggle free. The crown of her head distorts the mirror as she breaks the silver surface tension. Keep pulling, just a little more struggle. She would do the same in your position. This is all the justification you need.

But she flails. She wants to remain her just as much as you want to take her place. Her fists slam into the glass and your heady rosé dream shatters with the mirror as the pieces rain down on her throat.

Is this what you wanted?

You couldn’t get her all the way through. She gurgles, eyes rolling, head and neck protruding from what’s left of the mirror.

Is this what she deserves?

Your mirrorself is dying (you are dying), and you could save her.

Or you could finish what you started, pull her the rest of the way through, wincing, shaking, apologizing as the jagged edges bite into her. You could grab the silver shards and—carefully, delicately—form them into a blood-slicked facsimile of their original shape. A crude approximation of the mirror that once was, one that might let you through for the price of a few scars.

The trick is to steel yourself. Look through what’s left of the mirror. Listen to the girl bleeding out next to you and think very carefully about what you deserve.