The Woman in the Mirror Who Almost Popped the Crescent Moons

A woman stared at herself in the bathroom. There was an orange hue. Her pupils looked large and her vision blurry. She wondered when her eyes got so puffy. The moons underneath her eyes looked gradient with vibrant reds and purples. They were soft and pillowy, and she had the urge to stick a sewing needle gently into her under eyes—imagining them draining with ease and making her look lively and beautiful once again. She doesn’t recall the day that they swelled and never drained. 

She looked at her skin—worse that it has been in years because of forgetfulness. She stared at her empty looking eyes and tried to justify the emails sitting in her inbox and the assignments that now had clocks ticking down at the same speed as the pulse in her forehead. Maybe it was getting faster. She watched her elbow bend so that two fingers on her right hand could rest under her lymph nodes, looking for a pulse that would slow. She tried to feel her feet on the ground but when her inside arches had to be manipulated to touch the tile she thought of the years she used to dance. And, then there was a hair below her toe. She needed to sweep, well, maybe mop, it had been quite some time. 

She peeled the floral shower curtain back, which screeched as if someone behind it had been caught. She sighed softly—she had remembered to put back the plants she watered there earlier. At least she did that. She thought she should look for a new shower curtain, maybe a more simple one would make their bathroom look more adult. 

She wanted a break. She couldn’t look at a computer screen anymore. It had been running for so long the bottom of it felt like a heating pad meant to cook her insides. Her cheeks were also flushed. She wondered why she even owned blush. But, it was dark and no one was home. She couldn’t go on a walk without feeling paranoid, and she had been asking to hang out so much she couldn’t text anyone.  

Her reflection watched her, judging. She couldn’t stand to see herself, but she returned to meet her own gaze. She looked at the texture of her skin and her pores that had blossomed at the turn of a dark sky like nightshade crops. But, there were so many on her face, she thought, if they were nightshade vegetables she would be dead from solanine poisoning. 

Her cheeks took on more color, so much so that she could see the color of them through the thickness of the dim orange light. Her cheeks felt like magnets to the glass. She was obsessed with picking apart her face as if it was someone else’s—the woman in the cabinet, someone outside of herself. Someone who wouldn’t pick themselves a part, someone who had control. Her brain filled with fog and she moved as if she was walking through a sauna. When she sat on the closed toilet she felt like she could still see herself. She stared at the back of her own head, her own bony knees, her own achilles, her own rounded chin, and her own scarred cuticles. 

She would give up for the night and go to sleep hoping to wake up as the woman in the mirror.