I can’t stand to feel unimportant. Just think about it. Everytime you look in the mirror, there’s an image there. A perfect depiction of what you are, who you are, and it didn’t take an associates degree you could sleep through, or mindless hours spanned over years at a minimum wage job to create. Simply, because you exist, it exist…and that is beautiful, romantic, and awful all at once. The thought that I could have woken up hacking up a lung, the residue of plegm both bitter and metallic hanging on my lips, or just made it in after a long night of exchanging poetic affections with a small thin creature of the night painted up in petals, and smelling of the sweetest sins won’t matter one bit to the mirror. The mirror will see through love drunkenness, and disheveled clothes, or violent sickness, and cheap tailored suits and show every inch of me lonely, dissatisfied, and tired. I can shoot it a smile or a snarl, but the reflection of my eyes will convey every tear drop ever shed, and a crimson that never quite leaves me as I am quick to anger, offense, and judgement. Even if I do nothing at all and just stand there, not even staring, but being held in it’s gaze, an image myself, unmoving, I am in no time dismantled, and shown a truth that I had no hand in, and cannot escape. A truth I would have searched for my entire life, and discovered in my reflection the morning after the horrible thing happened. I am unimportant, and not necessary to be here.
That’s quite a pill, and you’re probably wondering why I’ve come here, why my reflections seem to rouse this…obsession. This weighty sadness. Well the answer to that, isn’t really a long story at all. So you may be disappointed at the end, but still…I owe you the explanation I myself wish I did not have, as likely if you are the one reading this, it is you who has discovered my body.
It starts two years ago. The morning that I had to kill my girlfriend, Patricia Morgan with a cheap lamp we’d found on sale at Walmart. She’d been infected you see. Caught by the same illness I can feel slowly creeping inside of my mind, making me numb, useless. She used to love collecting old antiques. We’d actually fought over that lamp, but I reasoned that it was cheap and would help her read that dusty old book she was translating. I’d come home one day. I was a barista then, and she loved the smell of coffee. Simple, that’s all it took to keep our passion going….but something had changed. She’d broken up a lot of our furniture, and made a small fire in our back yard, where I found her standing naked, skin glistening in the moonlight, but unnaturally. Her body seemed slick as if she was coated with some sort of ooze, or jelly. I reached for her alarmed, and noticed the knife all too late as she plunged it straight through my forearm. Writing this it seems weird, that for all the blood that spilled that night, there is now barely a visible scar. Anyway, she I shrieked, and ran towards the house, with every intention of locking her out, but I felt her on my back like some angry child, beating on my head, blows landing without care. Almost instantly, she fell forwards, and I reached for the lamp, and swung, and there it was. I knew she was wrong somehow at that moment. Her head broke apart like a glass jar. This woman that I loved, was not naked, and oozing on our floor. Blood like jelly, and bones like brittle shells. The sound of her breaking resonated in me, and as the pitch climbed higher and higher, time sped, and I became unaware of my life for several months after. It’s all a blur of police statements, and awkward conversations, strange people that came after I read her note. That’s right, Patricia’s note. The one that said she had to burn the book, because nothing mattered anymore. Everyone said it was stress that drove her…but after I read her note, which I’d only discovered after the funeral, I found a copy of that book…no…I found the same book, on my kitchen floor, after I ran in there investigating the sound of something dropping, and discovered its shape. Black, and frayed, with its illegible writing. The book looked so old it may well have been composed of dirt, and yet when the light touched it, it seemed to glow…or more correctly, it seemed to shine like something slick, and coated in wetness. My reaction then wasn’t fear but disgust, and I grabbed the book of the ground, picked it up, opened the back door, and hurled it back into the night from wince it came. I remember feeling relieved, but only for a moment as I turned and found the damned thing lying on my coffee table once I’d shut the door again. I kicked it over, and ran to my room, and shut the door.
After that, me and the book were awkward roomates. We acknowledged each other, but I went out of my way to avoid it at all times. I never knew where it would be when I entered my home. The fear took over, and I didn’t even feel grief anymore, as all I felt was the agony, and feeling of being trapped in a world where this book now controlled, and consumed my every action and thought. Eventually I quit my job. Locked myself in my room, and waited to die. I looked at my calendar and noticed that a year had passed, more so actually, and I had lost so much time due to the routine of avoidance I had set into. A knock at my window came at night on the second day of seclusion. A loud one that brought my attention to the illumination of a frightening smile, frightening moreso as my bedroom window was thrown open, and an old women stood outside, and nodded her head. I knew what she wanted. Never more terrified, I reached for her, and allowed her to come in, walk into my living room, and return to me cradling the book, and looking as if the skin of whoever she was wearing was trying to jump off of her with every step that she took. She paused, and in a voice like many voices blowing in a fan, she said to me “Did you read it?” Without answering, I could tell she knew I hadn’t, that I had been too scared to, and she smiled wider than what I knew to be humanly possible before leaping from my bedroom and into the night. I spent what felt like a whole day in that spot, not moving, before pawning my possessions, emptying my bank account, and getting a cheap apartment in some ghetto off a back road I hoped no one would ever turn down. What followed after that was horrid, and what led me here. People like the woman were everywhere, smiling, just smiling and nodding, and slowly it all left me. Every fear, thought, memory that would bring me pain. Just the sadness stayed, and feeling of being insignificant. That’s why this spectacle was necessary.
The elaborate death you discovered came from a google search of my many organs a human can remove before locing consciousness under a light anesthetic. I wanted to do something so horrible, people would know, and people would wonder why, in hopes that someone, somewhere, would find this book, and stop it. Stop the smiling people. The only clue I can give you, is what I said in the beginning. That bit abut mirrirs. The other day, I woke up, and I saw that smile…on my face…but it wasn’t my face. Not really…and that’s when I knew. That’s when I knew, that I had to die.
I hope I’ve scared you. Enough to want to find the truth, or run. Better and farther than I ever could. I wish you the best of look, and f you choose to pursue this. Please. Stay away from mirrors.