I peer in the mirror and search for unnatural formations on my face. It�s very �stressed out college student� of me, and I feel like I should be wearing either a Death Cab or Hawthorne Heights t-shirt along with my too-tight jeans and minor bulge of fat on each hip. It�s odd, though, so many hours of disguising insecurity with irony, you start to feel that it�s all genuine or it�s all a lie. This is a weird world.
I used to be kind of afraid of mirrors. Six years ago (you will recall that this was when I was institutionalized) I had a bit of a breakdown. Part of it was the mirror.
I had woken up one night, quite late, and I felt myself almost pulled to the mirror. So I looked in. Why not? It was late and I was feeling fuzzy.
It starts with your eyes. They narrow and slide further from one another. Suddenly they are cold and scared and alien all at once, and then your jaw widens, slightly, like when the LCD image on a camera bulges out and then returns to something midway between that and normal.
And then your lips thin and your nose slides slightly crooked and you hold your hands up to make sure you aren�t imagining it all and what you feel is like teeth�hard and strange and not yours.
And you feel your fingers trawling for something familiar, but you see them through the eyeholes of someone else�s face.
Maybe everything gets cold like how you described it to your shrink, or maybe you see something else in the mirror then, something worse. Maybe you see what you will become, days and weeks and months down the road. It could be a corpse, it could be a Gorgon, or it could be something twisted and ancient and slow, something with hot dank breath and blurred eyes. It�s you, unlike the face that you wear. Maybe you will die then, and sprawl out on the ground to be found, at last peaceful and cold.
I pulled away from the mirror because I knew that it would happen and I now will never take any sort of drug because if this is what a tiny bit of caffeine does to me at two in the morning than marijuana will just fuck my mind of out existence.
Jon says that I yelled at him. In all honesty, I don�t remember. I remember seeing things, horrible things, in the ambulance though, things that people on LSD talk about. Squirming shapes and faces that will not stay still. I�d have closed my eyes, but what lurked there was even worse. Silk-screened on the thin lids of my eyes was the image from the mirror, the one that looked so terrifyingly normal but was not mine. It opened its mouth every time I blinked, and I remember catching a glimpse of red movement behind its normal, pink tongue, like a sea of red worms overtook its vocal cords.
Jon never tells me whether or not I screamed then, but I remember the EMS guys getting worried. I remember them looking at me, and the constrictive clothing in which I was placed. I don�t remember much else.