Mirror Talks
She came into her room. The mirror was in front of her, waiting, as if their eyes were trying to find each other. At the moment when her eyes met the mirror, everything else just fell away. Questions could suddenly appear, but a narrow silence would explode into a thousand feelings. She had never realized that eyes can’t hide the truth; they cannot overexpress themselves.
“Nowadays, life is all emotions,” she said to the mirror, which gave no reply. The room stayed cold, as autumn was already on the edge of its blossom. Outside, the rain began gently, so she stood there in front of the mirror, enveloped in a silence that a very few could bear. She drifted into her thoughts: life is all emotions, and nobody can hide from them. Perhaps it’s a fact, and yet, the mere thought tries to deny it.
“Who would be interested in this?” she asked again to the now cold mirror. The powerless sun faded as clouds tried to embrace the last of its light. Tears fell from haze, kissing faces and grasses, while her thoughts wandered with the mirror, contemplating the awareness of her communion with it. And again, she thought: life is all emotions. Some of us are tired of them, others live with them, and perhaps a few of us die with them.
There was a break in her thoughts as living beings ran down the street; teenagers and children played around the trees as the sun started to peek out shyly. Her eyes began to look around, searching for answers to her questions, while the mirror continued to hold its focus on her heart. She could not escape this undeniable fact of pondering, just as life cannot escape death or colors cannot escape light, because they are all the same. And yet, she kept saying that nowadays, life is all emotions.
“The house library,” she pondered. Books can give us some insights into this matter of emotions, she thought, walking around the house toward the library room. It felt cold and dark in there, as if time itself were watching her movements like a god mocking mortals for their obsession with mortality, translated into chemical and electrical impulses. “Thus, life is all emotions,” she said once again as she chose books at random—if that was even possible, as an old science book noted, “There is no luck, and God doesn’t play dice with us.” Poor book, it was rejected immediately; it barely had a chance to be read. It seems that human nature is made up of complex systems in which simplicity is furiously rejected. “Nothing is so simple,” she added. “And perhaps one shouldn’t accept it. Otherwise, what would become of talks, debates, reasoning?”
Walking up to face the mirror in her cold, forgotten room, she persisted in the idea that life is all emotions, like an addiction to cigarettes or alcohol. Every time she needed to ponder or breathe, her mind returned without hesitation to the same issue, the same drug—tirelessly: life is all emotions. Every theory she read about how chemicals and electricity travel through the body and how the brain interprets this process into symbols and reactions made her feel unnatural. The mirror then started to show her a different way to acknowledge this basic yet complex issue. Why, she wondered, is human attention so focused on emotions if life depends entirely on them? It was a question she discovered by looking through the mirror.
A question appeared from no written word, from no spoken word—intriguing, isn’t it? As a professor once said, “The word is not the thing, it is not the emotion, it is not the body. It is like the wind that comes and goes; it cannot stay. For if the word stays, it will be held by Olympus and destroy the art of observation.” She grasped this saying, left the house, and no one has seen her again in that dark room, talking nonsense to that mirror.
