Do you ever stop and pay attention to the person in the mirror?
IMAGE
By
Samuel Connelly
Once again, here I am standing in front of that old bathroom mirror staring at my own reflection. My eyes walk over the outlines of my mirror-image as a man travels the hiking trails that set off along a great mountain’s ledge. After a minute, that last for what seems days, I come back to the center of this reflection who is staring back at me with the same dumb look on its face. I slowly bring myself closer to the mirror, face to face, breath to breath, and look into those light chocolate brown eyes. Deeper and deeper I search like a diver peering into a dark ocean in wonder of the mysteries that live down, way down, in its deep places. So many questions I want to ask. So many demands I want to make. So many things I wish I could change.
Camping out in my own image for what seems like forever, I can clearly see how life has weathered this man’s veneer. With a past full of pain, sorrow, love, loss, excitement, accomplishment, and disappointment, and a future full of dreams unfulfilled, I still come to the same questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Why are you here? Want do you stand for?
For years I have come to this silent meeting every single day and asked the same questions. Many times I have come mad, hurt, and disappointed but always sure of the same answer… silence. This silence, an awesomely tangible nothing, is so full of miscellaneous conversations that are too loud and too fast for me to understand any of them clearly.
At times I want to escape from my reflection and allow him to take the burdens of this life. At other times I am almost sure that I have seen him try and escape into whatever lies beyond the walls of his bathroom mirror. Is his world the same as mine? Is he living a better life? Or is he confined forever to the lonely solitary confinement of Reflected Image. It is an ever present cycle of madness.
It is easy to get mad and blame him for all the evil done, but as I point my finger and yell at him, he, never owning up points right back and yells it all at me. There is no escape.
And then I wonder…who is the reflection here? Of course it is him… or is it me?
Perry Conners, Arizona tycoon and soon-to-be politician, can't sleep or make love anymore, and he's losing all sense of reality. Is it the Devil's fault?
