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For some reason that morning, the mirror had piqued his interest.
It wasn’t elaborate or intricate, just a plain glass mirror. But he still stands there in front of it, studying his own face with a near-frantic look in his eyes.
What did she look like?
He knows that her hair was silvery and long like his, only straighter.
Like him, she had a dimple in one cheek but not in the other. He knows because of her smile, the one thing he’d never, ever forget.
The same pattern was embroidered onto the collars of both their jackets. Hers in silver thread and his own in gold.
They shared each other’s likeness. After all, they were twins. Her features were his own, and his were hers.
So why was he struggling to remember everything?
Almost nearly identical to him. That’s how she looked, right?
Or were her lips a little more full?
Were her eyes a little lighter?
Did she button her jacket over her sweater? Or did she leave it open?
He couldn’t remember. Dear God, he really couldn’t remember.
He reaches a shaking hand towards the mirror, as if it would give him an answer. As if he could somehow manage to see Angelica’s reflection instead of his own. So he wouldn’t forget again.
The glass is cold against his fingertips. The lack of sound in the small, cramped bathroom is nearly maddening.
Because he hates silence.
And she hated noise.
She always had.
But she was always there for him regardless of that fact. Willing to talk his ear off about anything and everything. Just to give him some peace.
And now she’s gone and he’s alone.
He never imagined that she would leave him so early, to the one place he couldn’t follow. Not yet. He never knew how much colder and darker his world would be without her.
It was like a layer of frost had begun to creep onto everything he touched, spreading unchecked without someone to melt it.
No. Not just “someone”.
Her.
He feels like he’s freezing over without her warmth in his life.
It had gotten to the point that he couldn’t even remember what her body looked like, despite having buried her with his own two hands.
Was it worth it? He tried so hard to block out the image of her corpse, but it had spread onto so many of his other memories. Like viscous, black ink. Staining and covering everything it touched. Blurring his memories of her. The memories of when she was warm and breathing and alive.
He tries to turn away from the mirror, he really tries. The only reason he stays is out of some selfish desire to look a little longer, to try and force something out of his subconscious.
He knows there’s no use pretending to see someone who isn’t there, hoping to drag up at least one memory of her face.
But there he stands, facing the reflection he suddenly loathes more than anything else.
Seeing the face, his face, that he uses to form a crude mental image of what she looked like.
Thinking of the imagination and memory that have failed him.
Realizing that she truly is gone, now that his memories of her visage have been lost to time and grief.