She and Me

She’s been forgiving, I must say. I tend to find myself indebted to her in some shape or form everyday. It might be said I manage to escape her clutches, but more often than not she’s fleeing from mine. I am frostbite to her sweet summery days. While she’s basking in the warm graceful sunlight, I shift uncomfortably in the dark, unkeen to anyone’s line of sight. It is in my dark proclivity that I find the deep seated pleasure and pain that drives me to do my foreboding work. I am tireless in my battle to find any way I can to impede upon her progress. She is a graceful goddess, swarmed by adoration and love. I always seem to push past the barrier beyond when she finds time to gaze at her reflection.

When she falls victim to the mirror, I hold the power, she no longer dances freely, uninhibited by shame and frustration. She takes great pause, she squints her eyes, and I take hold. I demand her attention. I have her. She cannot be expunged, she cannot be whimsical, she cannot be the beauty that she is when she faces me. I am a giant to her now, as she stays transfixed on her reflection. She mutters something quite extreme. She devastates herself and I see the light go out of her eyes. It’s my time now. I dip her sorrow to a level beyond her imagination. I force her to believe she’s inadequate. I make her rely on falsities until she starts to accept them as her truths. I start to run her down, dragging her sweet face in the dirt, exposing myself flagrantly, I have no shame when I shine. Every qualm, every quarrel, every tune that went awry, I sent out ten fold to entrap her and block out her chances to shake away the feeling she’s not good enough.

I mediate what was and what is, and I provide a substantially shaky ground for her to consider all anxieties of the future. I trap her inside her mind and I create an eclipsing barrier that serves to keep her inside. She can no longer dance freely, she’s ashamed of her body, of the moves she would make. She can no longer smile, for fear that no one should smile back. She doubts herself, she dismisses her strengths, she hides her genius. She becomes weak, depressed, and neglected. She hates herself. She stays inside. She exposes her body to cruelty. She puts her face in her hands and screams.

I find that I hold power over her for a good amount of time. Once she’s spellbound, I need not do much, for she seems to take charge. Her emotions bounce off one another till they create a negative spiral of afflictions and issues she never could’ve realized, had I not grabbed her attention. She sits quietly alone, debating how she can be better. If only she’d fix just this one thing, people would love her more. She’s wrong, of course. She sits in conversation with friends, lost in her head about habits she needs to change, about features and qualities on her body and face that just don’t belong. She loses connections, I win.

Sometimes she dares to dream bigger. She loves knowledge; that cannot be undone. She reads something new that sparks a change in her. She realizes perfection is detrimental and I get knocked down a peg. She decides the mirror is her trigger and I lose stable grounding. She tells herself she’s enough and I become suspended in the air of her mind, unable to grab hold of anything, unable to shape her reality. She goes for a walk in the morning, she breathes deep into her body. She does yoga quietly at night. She reads, she discovers, she explores how much more she is. I get hidden again, not quite dead, just suppressed. I’m always ready for her to see herself again. To fall right back into my traps, to demean herself, to repeat the same critical things she’s heard from me. She’ll fail again, I know. I never stay under long. She always finds a way to slip up. She can’t ever truly undo all the damage she’s experienced, all the subtleties repeated and retold to her that formed her opinions about what she should be, instead of what she is.

She manifests luck, she calls to the universe to receive all life can offer. She cannot control the world just her responses to it and that makes me angry. She’s learning, she’s adapting, but I know she cannot stick to it. There's too much in her mind, she’ll always fall victim to my calls. I feel a part of her loves the desolate landscape of her mind. A part of her desires to be lost to thoughts that pile harshly upon one another, creating layers of deeply ingrained methods that either lose her in their thick reality or clear a path to enlightenment. She’s starting to find enlightenment most often comes from the outside rather than the inside and that it might be easier to just avoid that lay of land all together. But she cannot avoid the mirror. I am there, always watching. There will come another day when her skin is dried up, when her face is too bloated, when her waistline protrudes, and I clock in promptly, shooting off insults, micromanaging each of my critiques to hurt the most, to sting harshly, to waiver her belief that she is good enough as she is. I win, I always always win.