‘You’re just like me,’ he says. I’ve lost track of how many
times I’ve heard this. I don’t know what it is in me that makes a boy look at
me and see his own reflection, not only in my eyes but in my mannerisms, in my
thought process and my personality.
But then maybe that is all any of us are, a mere reflection
of each other, the looking glass of the world. Maybe we are born blank canvases,
clean slates, and then we go into the world and we become a cross-stitch of
other people. Like a quilt, maybe we become an accumulation of the traits we
admire in others. Whether it’s the way your first love crinkled her nose when
she laughed, the phrase your best friend always uses, or the love of peonies of
your favourite television character, we fit them together, weave them together
with the strings of our own consciousness and wrap ourselves in it.
So perhaps I am a mirror lake, an echo of a million
different voices. Perhaps we all are. But then what happens when you take away
all the traits we’ve picked up, like children collecting seashells on the white
beach? Perhaps once you take away all the good, all that is left, all that is
truly ours, is the bad. The only thing that we don’t try to pick up along the
way is a darkness to add to the one inside of us.
So I wait for a boy to tell me, not that I am a reflection
of the best parts of himself, but that when I look in the mirror, the scars
reflected back match his. I wait for him to tell me that he lays awake at night
wishing he could dispel the same demons that I wrestle with. I wait for a boy
that looks into my eyes and does not see the mirrored surface of the lake, but
the still, icy depths.
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