Edited by Shloka Sankar
Mirror, mirror on the wall. The vampires are the lucky ones.
The rest of us keep looking at our reflection, trying to find out who we are. But we will not find an answer here. You say too little, and presume too much. When we look at you, we pretend that we can look at ourselves like everyone else does. That we are impartial observers of this mirror, coming across it for the first time. Doesn’t that give us the right to look upon you with such harshness? To criticize and correct. To loathe. To love. After all, you are a stranger, are you not? You are only a template for our imagination.
But we cannot be impartial to our image. In truth, we have known you for a long time. We know you too well. The acquaintance trapped in mirrors and shiny things. Someone we’ve seen grow up, and change. A friend, an enemy, and everything in between. What are we supposed to think of you, if on our best days, and on our worst days, all you do is stare?
Then the mirror holds nothing. We are not our image. Where do we look, then, if we want to know who we are?
But of course. As we look upon the reflection, giving it life, so does the world perceive us. Only observed, do we truly exist, living within the layered perceptions of alien consciousness.
If so, we are uncountable. Infinities trapped within temporariness, chaos perfectly ordered for so little time it appears some permutation of the chaos itself. That one moment the world was nothing, and then the stars took it upon themselves to fashion all of creation, and wrought delicate life from the bones of the world only so that they could be perceived, and therefore exist. That a distant supernova ripping through the inky darkness of a silent universe is entirely insignificant, but for the small child on a cold blue rock, eyes wide in wonder, staring at impossibility. That every time life forces itself into existence, the universe itself is born again, infinitesimally so, for it is nothing but a collection of observations. We live in a world that is many worlds, and every one of them warps and shifts and flares and disappears, like a billion stars in an inky void of chaos, that from a distance, looks like order, and then simply chaos again.
Who are you? You are a stranger, you are a friend, you are a lover, and you are a monster. There is someone that saw you when you were only a child in a stroller, and they will never think about you again, and there is someone who saw your name on a hospital logbook and they will think about you every day. You are the person who helped find someone’s lost pencil in the fifth grade, staying fondly in their memories for a lifetime, as a childhood crush. You are the person who unfairly got that promotion, the subject of someone’s envy, the tipping point they look to when everything first went horribly wrong. You are in the background, you are in the forefront, and you exist in multitudes.
To look at your reflection, don’t look in the mirror – look at other people. There you will find your infinite selves.
There is a woman by the water. She’ll repeat anything you say to her. There is a man beside her, and he only talks about himself. Her name is Echo, and his name is Narcissus. She will die loving him, and he will die loving himself.
Narcissus mutters to himself, talking about how great he is. Echo, forced to repeat what she hears, mumbles the same words while staring at Narcissus.
Is Echo being a narcissist?
No, you say. She is only repeating what she has heard. But if Narcissus perceives himself through others, as we discussed, isn’t he also just an echo of their observations?
No, you say. There is a third perception, one that we have of ourselves in our own mind, without an image, without the words of others. That is who Narcissus sees, leaving him a true narcissist, and Echo an echo.
But then, how do we form that perception? How do we know what is desirable, what is attractive? Raise a human child with an animal, and will they think that their fur is not shiny enough? Is it narcissism if you are an echo of the people you already love?
Is your beautiful laugh not the same as your mother’s? Is your handwriting, which you love, not the same as your kindergarten teacher’s? The way that you fold clothes, the way you lean to the side a little bit whenever you’re waiting, the long-winded way you tell stories, and the tiny words and phrases you slip into every conversation. Your family, your friends, the man at the corner store near your house when you were growing up, the quiet girl you spoke to in the last year of school, and never again. The people that you hate, and the people you cannot live without. How you walk, how you run, how you deal with grief, how you convey your love, and how you perceive the infinite world around you.
Thieves, all of us. Knowing what to love, by stealing from those we already love. Repeating what we see, but slightly altered. We use our own perception of the people around us, to construct a temporary self, that is then propagated to infinity by the many selves we become to the world.
To look at your reflection, don’t look in the mirror – look at other people. There you will find your infinite selves.
There is a woman by the water. She’ll repeat anything you say to her. There is a man beside her, and he only talks about himself. Her name is Echo, and his name is Narcissus.
They are different. They are the same.
Which one are you, when you self-reflect?