The Death of a Miracle

The Death of a Miracle 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had an aversion to mirrors. Not just mirrors, but my own reflection. I don’t care to look at myself for too long. I’m not the kind of girl who busies herself putting on her makeup and curling her hair everyday of the week. I’m lazy and simple. I’m boring and average. I’m as the phrase goes “not like other girls.” 

I can’t remember the first time I actually saw myself. I was a baby, probably more than a few months old. You see, I spent much of my time after I was born in the hospital with tubes and wires sticking to me. I couldn’t breathe on my own. Without incubation, I’d be…well, dead. 

“A Miracle” they called me. “Miracle baby” as if a baby could be something to be looked up to. I was supposed to be dead, and yet here I am alive. Being a supposed miracle just for not dying was a lot to live up to. It just made me hate myself even more. Not that you’d know. Death, after all, is no miracle. 

I wonder when I first looked into a mirror, what did I see? Ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes? A pair of brown eyes and wisps of brown hair? I had no thoughts then, but deep down perhaps I had some inkling. Some buried part of me I couldn’t quite grasp yet, nor understand. It was a black hole in my heart and each time I saw myself in a mirror, the hole leaked and cried like a baby in itself. A baby in a baby, what do you know? Perhaps “miracle” isn’t far off. 

But babies inevitably grow. They always do. So I too grew, not as much as others, but still I grew nonetheless. I was shorter than the other kids and looked far younger than I was. 

“You’re 12? I can’t believe it! You look 10,” people would remark when they learned my real age and I’d smile, not because it was funny or to be polite, but because it made me uncomfortable. They said that and that hole inside me would pulse and grow, leaking something I couldn’t replace. 

When I was grown, that’s when I became aware that the hole was even there. Something was missing and I couldn’t heal myself. I’d lay awake at night, missing something I’d never known, wishing things could change. But death is final, isn’t it? 

I’d brush my teeth. Shower. Brush my hair. That’s when I came face to face with the mirror. It seemed to call to me, like a voice beckoning me home. Fogged or clear, it pulled me towards it. I tried to resist. I really did, but the battle was all but lost and I’d sooner look into eyes that were not my own before ripping myself away. Everytime I looked into a mirror, something inside me threatened to split me open. I would bleed all over the bathroom floor if I looked too long. I may as well have been as helpless as the incubated baby I once was who spent months in a cold, sterile hospital room. 

So I did my best to avoid looking too long. It was too much for me. I became afraid of the hole within me. I feared that if I lingered too long, my heart would stop. 

My family, my dad especially, thought it foolish. “It’s not even alive,” he’d spit, and that hurt me more than words could ever say. Miracle or not, I’d been alive, as small and fragile as I’d been, so why couldn’t it be alive too? Why couldn’t it be more than just a mirror? More than just a reflection? 

I couldn’t shake that feeling. I couldn’t stop wondering if the mirror was more than what it was. It had to be alive in some way if it could do all this to me, right? 

As afraid as I was, as avoidant as I was, I found that I could not stop thinking about what I saw in the mirror. And not just what I saw but what I felt. I longed to press my palm against the glass, if only to see if I could reach inside and pull it free. The more I dwelled upon it, the stronger the urge became until it had all but consumed me. 

Fear be damned, one night I snuck into the bathroom. Leaving the lights off, I seated myself cross legged on the bathroom floor, hand held mirror in front of me. Even before I touched the mirror, even before I sat down, something had wrapped around me. It crawled its way between my ten toes and snaked up my legs. It curled around my torso and seized a hold of my neck. It was icy claws digging into my throat. I dared not breathe in fear that the grip would become stronger, and I waited with baited breath for its hold to pass. 

But it never did, and I sat there, trapped in the clutches of something I could never see. 

“Stop it, Am,” I hissed, but the anger gave way to guilt. It was all I’d ever carried with me, after all. So no wonder it’d show up now like an old visitor knocking on your door to let them inside. 

My hands were shaking. For a long time, after an eternity had all but passed, I dared to look into the mirror, and there I was. A woman of twenty-three who looked eleven years younger than she was and who felt far, far younger. All this woman’s life, she’d been mistaken as a child. Waiters would always ask if she wanted a kid’s menu at restaurants. Her mother would joke about her “little adult daughter.” Everybody saw her as something she wasn’t and something she’d never be. 

The worst was when her grandmother would try to give an explanation for her youthfulness. Not luck, not genetics, but “she was born premature.” And she’d pray her grandmother wouldn’t finish the rest because her grandma, nor anyone had no right to spout her truth. 

The mirror before me spoke that truth. It spoke of a twenty-three year old woman who was still but an unborn baby, connected by nothing but an umbilical cord, floating somewhere in the vast expanse of a mother’s womb. I glimpsed myself and it was not me I saw. No, not at all. 

Twenty fingers…twenty toes…two matching noses…the same thin lips. 

It’d never been the mirror calling to me. It’d been her. 

The baby who wasn’t a miracle. 

The baby who didn’t lie in an incubator while a tube forced oxygen into her still developing lungs. 

The baby who hadn’t grown into a twenty-three year old woman. 

I pressed my hand against the mirror and she did the same, and it was like our palms were touching. Somewhere in the vast darkness, I felt the hole widen impossibly wide. 

“Take me with you,” I implored, split apart. “Come back.” 

I didn’t care which. I only cared that we were never apart again. That we remained together, in life or death. That would show them all. Everybody who’d called me small, who’d called me lucky would finally see how wrong they’d been. They’d see and they’d kick themselves for ever thinking what they said in the first place. Even dad would feel bad. 

All that mattered though was that we would be together. Her and I. Me and her. Two halves of a whole no longer split apart. 

I pressed my palm harder against the glass. My fingers would slip through. They would touch her for the first time in a long time. I would finally feel her in the flesh. 

The glass remained. My flesh slid against the cold surface, blocked by the barrier that was the hand held mirror. I scratched at the surface, a flurry of motion with no sense or reason behind it. I pounded against the glass, my fingers curled so tightly my fingernails bit into my palms. I screamed, hitting the glass harder as the hole gaped and pulsed and I bled all over the bathroom floor. 

“Don’t do this to me!” I cried, attacking the mirror like a madman. Even as I wailed and clawed, my strength waned. My muscles ached and the hole kept getting bigger and bigger, so big that it could’ve swallowed me whole. 

Seized by the throat, I picked up the hand held mirror and flung out my arm with all my might. It flew across the bathroom and fell heavily against the floor. Glass scattered, the shards ricocheting every which way. I was bleeding, but I didn’t care. 

I crawled forward, glass digging into my hands and knees as I went. I didn’t stop until I’d reached the mirror once more. I scooped it up in my trembling scarlet hands and held it up. 

Half of the glass had become fallen shards. But the other half of the mirror, the half that was still intact, was cracked. Deep cracks splintered the glass like the most delicate of spiderwebs. In its broken surface, a single brown eye stared back at me. A face cut down the middle. I blinked and the eye did too. I cried and a tear slid down the reflection’s cheek…As if she was never there to begin with.

“I can’t do this without you,” I wept, my body shaking. “Please don’t leave me again. Please…” 

Who was I without a mirror? Without a reflection? Who was I without the “miracle baby” label they’d forced upon me? Who was I without the one thing that completed me? 

I sobbed, and my head fell to my lap. Warmth spread over me. It began at my chest and spread to my legs. It was spooling around me, so slow at first that I barely noticed it. My hand fell to my lap and my fingers came away, a shade of maroon that dripped off my fingertips in a pita pita pita rhythm. 

The redness was soaking into me, staining my skin and filling in the grooves of the tiled bathroom floor. Even in the darkness, the redness was so vivid, so clear in my mind’s eye. My hand dropped to my chest and my fingers wrapped about the sharp thing sticking into me. I yanked it free. 

In my hand was a huge chunk of glass, bloodied and jagged. 

Pita pita pita…

I yanked it free and the hole became a wound, leaking something I couldn’t replace. 

It was a miracle finally dead.