The Mirror

The mirror stood before me like a sepulchre built to admonish lost opportunities. My life stood before me as it had for the last fifty years; without excitement and without change.
Too late, I thought, to rescue this hideous frame from its mass of innocuous wrongdoings. I could join a gym to build a more supple body. I could register on match.com to find a kindred heart. It could read, “A middle aged man with quiet personality, subtle wit and poor personal hygiene seeks woman of same accord to enjoy nights of pleasure.”
I would die waiting for a response and would not be found until my rent was three months overdue or my carcass began to stench onto the street.
I could poke my eyes out, leaving me blind to the mirrors’ insinuations, still it would stand there, as if in a trance state, unable to show me any direction but unable to release me from its frozen grip. Why do I make this journey every morning; naked and alone?
I seek the voice of the mirror. Who is the ugliest of them all, I ask. There is no ball to attend or a pumpkin to convert to a carriage or a symbiotic glass slipper. There is just a mirror to remind me that my life is static.
I play the mirror at its own game. I try to stare it out until one of us cracks, but it holds me with its hideous image. Like fighting against magnetism I force myself against the glass and smash it with my body mass.
What I now see is distorted. Nothing changed but I no longer need to be captured by the image of the mirror.

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