I Don't Know Who I Am

[ry0un0suke]

Would you forgive me? All these years later, a stranger in your eyes with a torn, tired smile faint on my lips? The same as yours, but different. Do you forgive me for being different? Almost twenty autumns, or seventy-nine seasons turning and turning and turning o, did you love me at any point during it?
. . .   . . .   . . .

Sundered and smothered, I contemplate, deep, where in the world I fit. The circles I will run, eternal, comfortable in its familiarity. Miserable, and I lack the strength in my voice to continue my defiance. Perhaps, best, if I stop that cycle by keeping it from view. The land's pain my own, the land's memory long, the ancient and present sorrows all the same and without ending. Like wires; string, and hung, and bent, and spent I stand, or lay, collapsed: Remembered as miserable, recollection haunted by sorrows that shrink all measures of joy. I wonder where my wonder went and wander towards its ghost in masquerade of what I recall- not fondly. The memories grind a grimace into spirit, melting me into an unrecognizable failure.

---

The mirror started speaking one day. First warbling and twinkling sounds unreal. Like sparkling magic, miracles that fall into one ear and burst out the other as if running though a field of flowers. Sometimes, I think it laughed at something funny, but all I did today is cook the dish my youngest liked most. Savory usually and filling- grilled steak with sautéed peppers and steamed potatoes on the side. They weren't home to eat it. They haven't been home for a while. They haven't been home for so long that the meat came out saltier than usual and I realized far too late that my eyes glossed and each blink sprinkled an unintended drop into the sizzling pan.
 

It laughed at me.

 

When I first moved into this estate alone, I brought a mirror from my first ever home. I hung it in the foyer but moved it near the kitchen. Not once did it laugh, giggle, speak, but now it mocks me. I found some courage to slow the spoon in my hand and look at it. Stirring in the cloudy glass, staring at me is...
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