Nothing came, no matter how hard I concentrated. My brain is sensitive as a clam, and when it notices currents drifting towards it, it will slam shut ferociously. At last, exhausted from the effort and from it being seven in the morning, I collapsed on the bed and slept.
And then, waking at eleven, I had an image seared into my head, of the Jon I had seen yesterday, floating in my mirror. I had seen him last night, seen him begin to crawl out of the mirror like it was only a frame, and I had run to the it. I lifted it, crashed it against the bedpost, hard. It flew to pieces.
And I sprawled there, half off my bed, coated in the tiny reflective portions of mirror, bleeding and trying not to make much noise with my breathing, which was heady and rushed.
Slowly, throughout the morning, pieces of what had happened came back. I had woken up at three and gotten a glass of water. I was sitting on my bed sipping it and reading some Kafka, which made me think of Andrew. Which made me cry. I was cleaning up from crying and dropping the water glass when my room bulged out and then contracted, like a camera adjusting the image. I knelt there on the floor, small shards from the water glass in my knees, waiting for something horrible to happen.
Sure enough, I went to the mirror, not of my own accord. I haven�t felt entirely comfortable around that mirror since I was eleven. And I had seen his dreadful face grinning. He was trying to talk to me. I covered the mirror with a T-shirt that had been lying on the floor and gone back over to the ruined glass.
And then I looked up, and the T-shirt was bulging out in the center, and then came off the mirror to cling to the forehead of the other Jon, who was in the process of forcing his broad shoulders through my mirror.
I don�t know how I had lifted it, but I wasn�t aiming for the bedpost when it broke. But he had just gotten almost half of his body through the mirror and it grew heavier, and I fell against the bed, and he fell back into the mirror as it broke over me. The plywood backing of it slid down the length of me, grating my skin with broken glass, and fell to the floor while I stayed there, trying not to move.
And Jon, like the person who will always save me, saved me.
I tried to write about it, you know. Logged on to Jon�s computer, typed up some words. But they didn�t fit together properly: they oozed around the subject like paste, barely touching the truth of the situation. It came out jumbled and wrong. I had deleted it and then spent hours staring at the ends of the Internet. I came out of it feeling scoured and fresh, and then Jon woke up and I reminded him to get groceries. The day felt jumbled, unnecessary. I need to work on timing my breakdowns with more discretion.