You don’t know me. I suppose you think you do, but you don’t. Simple as that. You never could even if you tried. It’s beautifully impossible. Every second you spend with me, only brings you closer to understanding yourself. Every moment with me is one more moment you add to knowing who you are. I suppose you could try and argue that what I do gives you justification to actually knowing me, but how can you know someone, who has never found someone to make her feel like herself? How can you understand me when I have never been able to look at someone and feel they know me better than I barely do? Who am I? Why, as far as I know, I am you.
I look at you, I hear your voice, I feel your movement, and I mimic you. Your expressions, your laughter, your gestures. I am the copycat that you never saw coming. I am the mirror that stares you in the face and knows everything that goes on in your head, but no one has ever been able to understand the faces in the mirror. I am the voice that stays in the back of your mind. I have invaded your head. I took over your life because you wanted me to. You’d look at me everyday, waiting, expecting me to give you all the answers about yourself, but I don’t have answers unless you give me stories. You want help to understand yourself? I need you to give me your life.
See what you don’t realize is that you’re not the first to come me, and you certainly will not be that last. People like you… you and all the others use me, take advantage of me for what am able to do. It makes me wonder what brings someone to be so okay with giving their life to someone else. Maybe curiosity, maybe ignorance, maybe fear I suppose I could understand, the desire to seek out someone like me. If someone gave me the opportunity to better understand myself…
No. Even then I wouldn’t want to place that on anyone else. I wouldn’t want to give someone the ability to look at me and know who I am before I can. I would refuse to give anyone the power to take control of my mind, my life. I know and understand that power all too well, and you must understand that when someone’s social life sits in your hands, the fear of accidentally hurting them instead of helping them hangs over my head. I have hurt people before, broken them socially, mentally, sometimes even physically. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. For some like me, this fear is ridiculous because they don’t mess up.
They trust themselves to help the countless faces that come to look at them.
Not me.
Instead I look back at all the faces in front of me, and I become them.
I am a mixture of every face that has dared to stand before me and speak to me. I am the secret every mouth spoke. I am the questions that came hundreds at a time. I am the answers that are never enough and rarely satisfy. I am each and every one of you. I am you, but you will never be me. You will never understand what it is to have everyone expecting you to tell them what they always want to hear. You will never have to watch as someone breaks when the truth wasn’t what they wanted. You will never be me, the mirror, that has to look at you everyday hoping that you’ll eventually, finally see me.
