Reflections and Lost Identities

My wordbound week 23 entry! A scene that prominently features a mirror

            She did not know how long she’d stood in the bathroom, staring at her reflection above the sink. For a while she had held it in a death grip, mind a whirl of emotions and doubts and furies, but her grip had lessened as the inner monsoon dulled to the barest breeze. Hands hung at her sides, loose and weak, all the energy having drained from her body.

            The face that stared back at her was familiar, but grew more alien with every passing second. She knew every line, she knew the story to every scar, but with the faintest flickering of panic she began to question whether she did or not. Memory was a fleeting thing, and though she was not inclined to the philosophical – or, in all honesty, many esoteric and not concrete pursuits – she pondered this idea. How perhaps memories could be shuttled from one brain to another, with the right synapse stimulus or the right brain rearranging. Not for the first time that evening, a chill ran up her spine, and though a small part of her wished to wrap her arms around herself in a reassuring embrace, she could not gather up the will to do it.

            She looked at the dark hazel of her irises, calling up a memory of how a boy in high school had complimented the streaks of green one could see if they got close enough. Her vision drifted to a scar that cut through her eyebrow, leaving an awkward part, one she had gained in a fight defending a fellow classmate; a class ring right to the face. She’d been proud of it. Next, her hair. Long and flowing, she could hear the distant imprint of her mother’s voice, cooing over how beautiful it was. How it would be a shame for it to be cut; a tragedy of a beautiful thing lost to the world.

            Wrong. All wrong. It wasn’t hers, it had never been hers. Someone else’s memories, someone who bore her face and her name but had died long, long before. She was impersonating a corpse, a zombie infiltrating the living and she hadn’t even known it. No one seemed to realize it. Not this body’s family, nor her friends. She slipped into the role effortlessly, as if nothing had changed, even if everything had.

            Her fingers flexed at her sides, suddenly restless and desiring to move. She knew that she – no, this woman – kept a pair of scissors in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, to cut away uneven strands that didn’t require a full trip to a hairdresser. Shaking herself out of her daze, forcing herself into the present, she opened the cabinet, and pushed aside bandages and pain killers (ones she never needed, but kept around just in case) to find the scissors. The dull panic that had controlled her the past few hours was ebbing away, giving to a sort of confused fury that burned through her like a virus.

            She shut the cabinet to be confronted with her reflection once more. Her chest heaved and her face distorted into a snarl, as she reached up to wind her fingers through her thick brown hair. In the back of her mind she could hear a voice, her – no, not hers, this body’s – mother’s, complementing the pale shade of brown that pushed it towards blond. How her hair was her greatest asset, a nice accent to her muscular body. She sneered further, nose crinkling and eyebrows furrowing and her teeth baring to rip out the throat of an unseen enemy.

            Without hesitation she raised the scissors to her hair, pulling it taunt enough to strain at her skull. She took a deep breath, one that hissed between her clenched teeth, and snipped. She sawed through the thick bundle, feeling the weight fall away and strands falling to tickle the back of her neck. The cuts were amateur, ragged and everything was at an angle but she didn’t care; she just needed to do something for herself. To set herself apart. To distance herself from her reflection, from a dead woman whose name and face and memories she bore.

            She slowed, took a few deep breaths that shook in her chest to calm herself, and proceeded to even the cut as best she could. Then, she stared at her reflection. The face was still the same, bore the same lines and scars and stories, but her hair was different. It sat at an awkward bob that reached just past her chin, halfway too her shoulders, with the foot of now lost hair sitting in a sad pile at her feet. She wanted – no, needed – it shorter, but supposed that could wait. She would redefine herself, form a new identity from the one handed to her, and try to do her reflection proud.

            But at that time, she supposed all that was left to be done was to clean up the mess she’d made.