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Every night at exactly 12:00, the mirror in my room showed a different version of me—one that smiled even when I didn’t. Tonight, it spoke…
“You’ve been running circles around yourself, haven’t you?”
…It was strange, this one. On nights like these, he would always seem a little too different, a little too impersonal— but this particular night, I looked at him— really looked at him. The eye he looked into me with was quite like mine- except it didn’t carry the weariness of labor the dark circles under mine do. The other had been replaced with a black sensor— in turn for the bruised, purple one of mine— but his instead had a heart that blinked back at me with an earnest curiosity. His body was a shiny metal— that wasn’t marked with the scars of my own pale skin that had been inflicted with punishment. He was a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger than my own short, stubby one— but not a comical amount. He looked healthier. His smile wasn’t forced in the same way mine was— it was genuine, and had the gentleness of pretty shades of paint being streaked along a canvas…
He looked happy. Genuinely happy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself that happy.
“Are you… real?”
“Are you?”
I blink at the simple question his staticky voice allows himself to ask. He simply tilts his head with a naive curiosity.
“Well… well of course I’m real.”
“Then I don’t see why I wouldn’t be real.”
I blink again- he’s still there.
“Who are you?”
He laughs at that- a filtered, robotic sort of laugh that sounds all too much like it’s supposed to be me.
“You, silly! You do know you’re looking in a mirror, right?”
I reach out to him. The glass sends a spark that wraps around my fingers- not painfully so, but I still can’t help but panic.
“You’re not me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m me! How can you be me if I’m already here??”
I feel like a fool, yelling at myself like this— but he doesn’t return my energy. He doesn’t pass off my irrational resentment towards him, or react at all towards the fact. But he asks me a very simple question:
“...Are you happy?”
My eyes flicker— and so does his. Am I happy.
“Do you mean, like… now?”
“Are you happy? Being you?”
I look at my hands with sudden pondering. They look just the same as they always have, calloused, bruised, and just as beaten as the rest of my body. He asks me another question:
“When was the last time you looked in the mirror… and smiled at yourself?”
My eyes return to his patient ones. I look at him again, up and down, up and down. Trying to find an answer in the past sixteen years I’d gone through this cycle. But seeing him… really seeing him for the first time…
I smiled for the first time that night.