🪞Mirror, mirror...wait for me.

The class was almost at an end, when, as if having a second thought...Ms. Bosomworth yelled over the din of everyone packing up to exit the chaos which was the classroom.

"For tomorrow's assignment...write a fictional story which echoes from far away". The entire class groaned in tandem.

"Yes, Ms. Bosomworth". Giggles and chuckles. Jodie smiled...she was used to the playful ditties about her name.

How does one do that 'from afar' story, I wondered. I thought about it all the way home. By the time I got home, I had the answer. I would simply interview my mother, she was always telling weird stories of her growing years.

A true story which I could deem fiction. I wouldn't tell dear mother that, I thought smiling. I am sure she will add a bit of fiction for dramatic effect.

My mother was overjoyed. Finally...someone would listen and maybe empathize with her childhood.

"When I was five", she began...I wondered when I would be ten years old. The years moved so slowly...But suddenly, I was twelve and my stupid body began feeling like it belonged to an alien from a galaxy far, far away.

I was peering into a warped mirror, watching myself grow up from a distance...where time glitches and bodies betray, and clarity only arrives when the moment is already gone.

🪞

Ten had felt like a distant kingdom: sparkling with shoes that clicked on pavement, with laughter at sleepovers, with people who knew things. Big things. Like how to braid hair without you crying, or how to walk into a room without needing permission.

The years moved so wonderfully slowly. Each birthday was a mountain. Each school year, a swamp.

But, yes...twelve.

And my stupid body, that once zipped joyfully through sprinklers and climbed fences like a pro, began to feel... wrong.

It swelled in strange places. Folded in others.

I looked in mirrors and saw someone being replaced...yep...that dang alien from a galaxy far, far away who had crash-landed in my life, wearing my skin like a borrowed coat.

And I watched myself...like a ghost haunting her own childhood. ..as if from far away, everything looked neat, charming. A girl with braided hair swinging her legs, pretending not to notice how the world had begun to tilt.

But up close, I was blur and an ache of insecurities..

I was hiding in bathrooms during dances, hiding in closets at home reading forbidden books, pretending to read maps to galaxies that didn’t exist.

I was learning the art of avoidance: how to smile just enough to keep people from asking questions. How to disappear without leaving the room.

Now, I understand though: the distance made it even more beautiful.

Only when I stepped far enough away could I see the shape of who I was becoming...not as disaster, but as those promised growing pains to arriving at maturing me.

A creature growing legs not for running, but for standing firm. ..the haunted teenage years loomed, giving way to early adulthood, where memory warps and reflections fray.

🪞

By the time I was twenty, the mirror no longer showed me what I looked like.

It showed me how I was remembered. Flickering frames, like film reels caught in sunlight, spooling moments which I never quite lived the way I meant to.

There was the girl at eighteen who shaved her head to feel the air. The one at nineteen who kissed a stranger to prove she wasn’t invisible.

🪞

"Awww! Mom". A smile twitched at the corners of the mother's mouth and an affected gasp from the daughter's.

🪞Mother continues...

The version of me at twenty-two who stood in a library aisle, clutching a philosophy book like it might explain why she dreamed in symbols instead of words.

Time didn’t move forward, not really.

It spiraled.

Each year nested inside the last, like dolls carved from my memory...each one with stranger eyes.

Some nights, I’d walk past mirrors and catch glimpses of the other selves:

The twelve-year-old alien, still fumbling with her borrowed body.

The five-year-old dreamer, still waiting to become ten.

And the present me, blinking in soft lamplight, asking her reflection:

Are we finally real?

I thought growing up meant arriving.

But now I see...it meant splintering beautifully.

Not one version walking forward, but many entering and emerging through mirrors, each one learning the art of holding inconsistencies. Reflections, paradoxes, weaving like thread through frames of memory.

"Oh Mom". Her teenage daughter sniffed, wiping her eyes. "That was so beautifully sad, yet filled with hope. I hope I can see myself in similar ways as I am maturing. I am so glad for this assignment. I mean, I never actually listened before".

Mother and daughter hugged each other and sat for a while getting it all down in her notebook.

🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞

Many years later, Mother found the notebook in the box in the attic. Her daughter had gotten an 'A' for her work.

The house was now an empty nest...kids grown and the rooms only ghostly reminders of years of childhood.

She pulled up a dusty old chair, sat wearily down and filled in the missing years.

...

My story picks up many years later...the years in between seems to have vanished, melted into a void and suddenly my hair is gray and time now crawls.

Like smoke, those years dissolved without a trace~ no diary, no witness, just absence in the shape of memory. Her hands remember motions she doesn’t recall learning. There are sigils carved into her quiet now.

The story she touches feels at once foreign and familiar, like a dream borrowed. Time drips instead of flows, and even language tastes different on her tongue. Yet through the gray, she carries a strange serenity...earned not from knowing, but from surviving the forgetting.

What would she see if the mirror cracked backward instead of forward?

Before time crawled… she was a younger self folded into a dream, chasing shadows that dwelled just outside the margins. Life was all momentum then, all sharp beginnings with no awareness of ends. Her mirrors were clear, their reflections obedient. She walked through names and seasons, touching love, grief, ambition...and leaving fingerprints on none.

There were clues, of course, that something would break: the half-written letters, the misplaced keys, the moment she stared at her own reflection and didn’t blink. That was before the melt began. Before language dissolved into silence and she slipped between chapters unnoticed.

Then one day, the story picked her up again.

She was older. Her hair, gray. Her time, slow. Her void, vast.

Yet, she was ready to rest now. Pulling the silence closer like a shawl, she traced her memories for the years to come.

She stands now in the hush, unafraid of what hands no longer grasped. The melted years has become a kind of sanctuary...not empty, but spacious enough to hold her gently. Her silver hair is not a mark of loss but of arrival.

She smiles...not the brittle smile of someone pretending, but the kind that’s weathered grief and grown roots in quiet joy. There are lines around her eyes where laughter once camped and sorrow once lingered, and she thanks each one for staying.

The beginning waits...not behind her, but beside her. She breathes in, and the breath is acceptance. She breathes out, and it’s hope.

She accepts, is thankful for her lived life and happily looks forward to the beginning of the continuation.

Not a sequel, but a soft uprising.