Mirror

One by one, lost the appetite once he had, started forgetting even most basic stuff, started neglecting the loved ones and himself... He ate too much or ate not nothing at all most of the times. Slept all the time or stayed awake for many mornings. Felt everything or did not feel at all. Yet nothing bothered him as loss of passion to his profession. Writing was the thing that gave life to him. His passion slipped away from his mind’s eye as he was not able write even a single word. He knew that life could not be sustained within isolation in a small,messy apartment with only one room filled with trash, left-overs and piles of dirty clothes and bills.

Though many hours of pill-forced sleep, he still woke up sick and tired. He pinched his neck and felt his eyes to be sure that if he was still dreaming or tired. He eyelids were heavy enough to carry thousands of burdens. As his room was pitch-black dark, curtains were closed like always, he was not sure if it was daytime or an hour of night. Not that it mattered anymore between the booze and the pills. Stared to the ceiling for a while with nothing on his head wishing not to wake up at all.

He knew it could not go on like this forever. He had to change his perspective on life. He had to push himself no matter what were the circumstances. For a brief moment, his gaze drifted toward the dusty desk, cluttered with unread books and a computer filled with abandoned ideas. He looked at it because, at that point, he was utterly desperate.

He finally dragged himself out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. The mirror above the sink greeted him with a stranger's face. Dark circles hung beneath hollow eyes, swollen from countless sleepless nights and restless mornings. His cheeks had sunk inward, his skin pale and lifeless, stretched over a frame that had grown alarmingly thin. Neglect clung to him like a second skin. He simply stared and barely recognized the person staring back.

Returning to his room, he lowered himself into the chair before the dusty desk. The computer screen illuminated the darkness as he searched desperately for something to write about. A story, a character, a fragment of an idea,anything. Yet every thought dissolved before it could take shape. The cursor blinked against the empty page, waiting. After several minutes of silence, he let out a tired sigh. If he could not write about anything else, perhaps he could write about himself. About the thoughts he spent years trying to silence. About the feelings that followed him like a shadow. His fingers hesitated above the keyboard before finally pressing the first key.

“As I grow older day by day, I begin to realize that there is no place for me in an ever-changing world. I cannot fit in and cannot keep up with it. The feeling of dissonance, like a misplaced piece of puzzle, becomes more and more profound with each passing day. Isolation from everything and everyone seems the only logical solution and an easy way out. A retreat from all chaos and a haven where nobody can reach would have been my golden mine. However, deep down I know. This is not the answer. The need for connection and contact wars with the desire of solitude, creating a bleak state of mind.

I find myself contemplating every second before I act, calculating every move to avoid pain. And still, I fail. This precaution drives me to an unhinged madness,a mind torn to pieces by overthinking.. The hurt, the disappointment, it all creeps in, bit by bit. So instead of truly living among others, I have become an observer, watching from the sidelines as life unfolds around me. I witness joy, fleeting as it may be, and cling to those moments as though they might sustain me.

After all, we are social creatures. Beings are driven by chemical reactions and emotions full of love, hate, greed, and an unrelenting urge to connect, be loved, and love in return. But often times these urges can bring out the worst of us as there is no such thing as enough for craving validation, attention and affection. The satisfaction overwhelms the mind, it needs to be fed all the time. We feed it constantly, sometimes without even realizing it, and in doing so, we devour ourselves and others.

At first glance, this need may seem innocent, even natural. But people, like any other living creature, are cruel. We act on impulses, on desires, often without regard for the consequences. And perhaps the cruelest thing is not what we do to others, but what we do to ourselves. And I am cruel to myself in more ways than I can count. Humiliating before anyone else can, criticizing, doubting, punishing. It’s a form of self-defense, or so I tell myself. Like a parent who was never truly there for their child, I inflict wounds on myself so no one else gets the chance to do so.

As I look in the mirror, I see a stoic figure staring back at me. A person burdened by years of self-inflicted cruelty, of wearing armor so thick that nothing can penetrate it. Yet all that time, behind such stoicism, I know there is something fragile, seeking more. The figure I see before me is not whole but a patchwork of broken dreams and silent screams stitched by bitter threads of resignation. Reluctant to achieving peace within. I wonder, how long can I keep this facade up? How long until the cracks widen and the rotten blood under the skin, the person beneath is fully revealed, vulnerable and exposed? How much longer till the mirror finally cracks in half?”

He remained seated in front of the glowing screen, the final words still visible on the page. The room stayed unchanged, quiet in its familiar emptiness, as if it had long learned how to exist around his silences without asking for anything in return. Outside, life continued in its ordinary rhythm, cars passing, distant voices fading into one another, time moving forward without pause or awareness of him.

Inside, nothing had truly resolved and nothing had been repaired, yet something had shifted in a way that was difficult to define. It was not hope and it was not peace, but something thinner and quieter, almost fragile enough to disappear if acknowledged too directly. The simple fact that he had managed to turn what had been trapped inside him into words on a screen lingered in the air like a faint afterimage. He stayed there for a while longer, hands resting loosely, eyes fixed on the soft glow, not smiling and not relieved, but carrying a slight, quiet satisfaction in having created something again out of the weight he had been carrying for so long.