[ poetry ] This is a fascinating literary collision

[kiya]

Miria

A mirror
Is a harrowing thing
And I hid from them
For years,
Flinching back
From the memories of monsters
Peering around the jamb
Of duplicated doors,
Hungry for thought.

I am
No longer
An extracted reflection
But changed:

At last

I saw me
Instead
Of you

And I am not afraid.


When I was a kid I was a ravenous reader of many things, including "approximately everything Gerald Durrell ever wrote". After I worked through the funny family stories and the information about collecting animals for other people's zoos and the establishment of the Jersey Zoo and was looking for More Book, and nabbed off my father's shelf The Picnic. This started out as a sequence of stories that were maybe too gross to put in the other books (seemed to be the organizing principle?) and ended with ...

... in retrospect, as an adult, I suspect this was a horror story, but it was tucked in with a bunch of life stories, and everything I read from Gerry was nonfiction, so when it chronicled a journal of someone who was either descending into madness and hallucination or who had encountered a monster in the mirror that would grab reflections and smash their skulls open to eat the contents thereof at the age of approximately eight or nine, my reaction was to flee my bedroom with its large bureau mirror, fortify myself behind the laundry hampers in the upstairs bathroom (out of line of sight of the small bathroom mirror), and read Pogo until I was discovered by bewildered parents.

I had a phobia of mirrors for the following near-forty years, which was not responsive to EMDR, and which spiked worse when I was under stress (leading to a memorable moment at the Seattle APC, which was held in a hotel with mirrors on two sides of the elevator, where I tried to crush myself into the alcove created by the door every time I used the damn thing). I worked with this fear consciously as part of my Feri training work but it was always there.

I'm not sure it's there anymore?

Comments

[batrachian]

Mirrors are such a...muchness, even without That Layer.

[graydon]

Hail! slayer of monsters.