THE MIRROR

Hmm. Today’s an interesting day. Except that it’s not. It’s just like every day. You’re stuck inside, for the indefinite future. You don’t know what to do about it. You scroll aimlessly through content clearly aimed for other people.

You finally decide you might just stream something. You’ve heard there’s some interesting new stuff on the platforms you frequent. And you plop yourself down comfortably in front of your screen. And then, it happens.

You look for too long into the murky reflection that stares back at you. You’re trapped. You know what needs to happen now.

You are a person, but at times, you don’t feel like it. You just feel like an emotion, brought to life by the sheer concentration of it in a single mind. You have a name, but it feels like a misnomer; a society’s idea of who and what you are. Maybe you are this, maybe you’re not.

You’re the school jock. Or, maybe you’re the class nerd. You’re one of the popular kids, or you’re just another face in the crowd. But that doesn’t matter now. You’re beyond those divisions.

You’re a entire, independent individual being. All by yourself. But you don’t know what’s happening to your self. You can’t understand why is it you feel the way you do.

No one understands you either. Come rain, come wind, they don’t get you. They try to pigeonhole you into labels. They try to conform you. But you struggle. Because you know something is wrong with you.

You can’t seem to put your finger on it. But it doesn’t care. All it wants to do is to haunt you, to scare you. It’s always lurking in the shadows. It takes the joy out of the things you thought you might have enjoyed. It leaves you less than what you are.

Frustrated, you walk through the streets everyday. You blind yourself to the people all around you. You don’t care about joy, you don’t care about gloom. You don’t feel happy, neither do you feel sad.

Finally, you hear what educated people, who seem to be in the know, call it. “ Depression”, “ The big D”, “ that thing those attention seekers say they have, right above a picture of them in the skimpiest clothing imaginable”

You feel an anger burn deep within you. You find it arising from the depths of your soul. You call it righteous, and you wear it like armour. And so, on and on and on you go. With each step you take, that armour grows heavy, because you seem to be the only one who cares.

You take it as a clue that you’re meant to be different, to be above the herd. Yet you try so hard to be one of them. To experience what they have. And this search takes you places.

Some of them are dark, while the rest are lit up in varying shades of grey. The armour’s starting to weigh down. It’s so hard to do this alone.

Then you find it. What you’ve been looking for, from so long. It comes to you when you least expected it. The armour’s starting to come off now. You begin to feel like someone totally new.

However, there’s still a couple things that seem to be holding on tight. That corrugated breastplate won’t give way. You can’t seem to pull it off of you.

For the moment, you decide to hang on. It’s manageable, but the weight makes it a little harder to breathe than usual. You are confused. You are lost.

You wonder as to why you seem to be afflicted with this. You try to find someone who can lift this weight off. People come, and people go. But some come very close. Very close. But they can’t do it. And so, you carry on.

You know how you feel. Tired of this world, weary from wondering about your purpose. There are words of comfort here, and those of encouragement there, but they fall like drops from a tap. Slow, singular and unfazed.

You are at a crossroads now. You don’t know why you’re here. You see two roads ahead of you. One leads to contentment. The other, solitude. But the paths seem to weave into each other, diverge off, and converge again.

You stand at the crossroads, and there you remain.

But then. You’re saved by the familiar start-up tune that drives you out of your reverie. You shake off your daze, and push yourself a little further into the cushions.

You know what you feel. Only you know the anger, the rage, the sorrow, the pain, and the regret that resides beneath that breastplate of armour. But you also know that this your weight to carry. And you slump into a less wound up stance.

The mirror on the wall doesn’t tell you if you’re the fairest of them all. It tells you why you don’t feel anything, at all. But that doesn’t matter, does it ? That show you’re watching, it’s interesting.

Once you’re past that intro, this has all been but a daydream. There’s no punchline at the end of this. There’s no moral to this story. You’ve reached to this point because you know exactly what’s waiting at the end of this line. And with a knowing smile, the screen fades away into an outburst of colour………………