Shards of a Life

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. Who was that old woman staring back at me? Why is she here in my bathroom?

She has been beside me for the past ten years in everything I’ve done, following me everywhere I go. However, I only see her in reflections. She is bent and weathered, unlike me. I feel fresh and vibrant. My mind is no different at seventy than it was at twenty. Ageless, I will live forever as my best self, never changing.

I woke in a fog, one confused morning after a dreamless night, stumbling blindly into the bathroom to rinse out my wine-soaked, stale mouth. Oh, Lord. I found the old woman staring back at me from the mirror over the sink and I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Stop. Stop. Stop, dammit. Stop chasing me. Leave me alone. Go bother someone else. Can’t you see I’m having a bad morning?” I screamed at her face in the glass as I tossed a hastily discarded high heel from the previous night at her.

She shattered without a word, staring back at me sadly with crinkled, dull eyes. Her hair was a tangle of silvery roots peeking out of the unkempt forest of artificial auburn curls. ‘Who was she kidding?’ I thought. Her pursed mouth was sitting at the intersection of wrinkle and line, with her garish russet lipstick bleeding into the gutters along the roadway of her face.