Movement Seven -- What Broke and What Remained

The mirror in front of me shattered.

I did not touch it. I want that understood plainly, because I think it matters -- no hand reached out, no fist struck the glass, no violence passed between me and the surface I had been staring into for however long this account has taken to tell. It simply broke, all at once, into more pieces than I could properly count, the particular fracture pattern of something that has finally been asked to hold more than it was ever built to hold.

And yet the reflection remained.

I want to describe this to you as carefully as I can, because I do not fully understand it myself, and I think honesty, at this point in the telling, is the only thing I still have left to offer you. Where the glass had been whole a moment before, and was now a hundred broken fragments scattered across whatever ground I was standing on, the reflection continued anyway -- a man, or something shaped like a man, and beneath the shape of the man, something else. Something that did not deserve the word man at all. A monster, patient and unhurried, looking back at me from every single shard at once, each fragment holding a piece of the same unbroken, terrible face.

It laughed.

I do not have a better word for what that laughter did to whatever I have instead of a heart. Unbearable is close, though even that feels too small, too tidy, too easily said. It was not loud. I want you to understand that -- it did not need to be loud to do what it did. It was simply there, patient and certain, the particular laughter of something that has always known exactly how this would end and has simply been waiting, all this time, for the rest of us to catch up to the knowing.

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I looked at the hundred fragments of that face, and I asked it, though I do not know now whether I asked aloud or only in whatever place thoughts happen before they become words, are you the plant, or are you the voice that has been judging the plant this entire time, or are you something else entirely that both of those things were only ever hiding from?

It did not answer. I do not think it needed to. I think the not-answering was itself the answer, and I think I have understood, somewhere in the silence that followed, that I am no longer capable of telling you, with any confidence at all, who is currently looking back out of that glass.

I do not know if this is what I am supposed to feel. I do not know what I feel, most days, or how I am meant to feel it, or whether the flatness I described to you earlier -- the quiet, empty thing I find whenever I look into an ordinary mirror -- was ever actually empty at all, or whether it was simply this, waiting underneath, patient as coal, for the exact moment the glass could no longer hold it back.

Perhaps this is simply the life of this sad little plant. Perhaps it always was, from the very first moment it learned to lean toward the light, and I have only now, after all this telling, finally found the nerve to look at it plainly.

I do not know, any longer, whether "I" is a word I am still entitled to use.