While I remain ill/have the week to recover, I thought I’d post up the first piece of writing I ever put on here, over a year ago now:

The Mirror of a Million Fragments

For me, there was always an obscure magic in symmetry. The enchantment, however vague, lies not in the paper reflections of shapes, or the dual vanities of polished glass – even the deep maths of angles and proportion are entirely unfulfilling. My interest, my pleasure, perhaps my obsession, lies instead with a universal symmetry, of present reflecting past, of today echoing yesterday, each year endeavouring with strict mimesis to imitate that which is lost to time’s airy kingdoms. Once, I was sufficiently content to abandon this strange show of shadow puppetry, but now I pursue it with a vengeance. My archetype is set, and I search for the signs, the feelings, the acts, which are somehow reminiscent of those which no longer exist. Such symmetry, such mirrors, are all to me. They are structure and, somehow, they are hope; a smaller, clinging hope.

Thus I committed myself to the search for any reflection, however dim, however broken, and began to construct my mirror of a million fragments. At first, I found that today is nothing but a contrived impression of yesterday. Summer, and all its lazy thoughts, its scents, its natural scenes, slid identically into earthy Autumn, which offered its hand of wood smoke, of low, shimmering vapours, fallen leaves and a golden sun relieved of daily guard by the gentle, copper moon. More than once, I had heard all of life likened to a vast stage of exits, no less dramatic than arrivals, and duly the assortment of minor scenes (I accepted that the greater, major acts at the heart of the play had been lost for all of infinity) were re-enacted in a nebulous, dispersed fashion, which I could, with no little effort, shape into the order demanded by the mirror. More faith, more satisfaction, I placed in my mirror, and expected that very soon it would yield a reflection brighter than the silver sun. Onwards, and I began to wonder that, as the symmetry clarified and the mirror, no longer one gargantuan structure but a multitude of tiny glasses scattered throughout fragile reality, my feelings were stirred. Meeker, weaker (but I had expected this, of course,) I gazed about the half familiarity, and was duly half comforted. Perhaps, I mused, perhaps.

Time is fickle, though, and awareness, once realized, cannot be dismissed. As such, one night, when thunder rumbled upon the horizon of some distant kingdom, but did not dare trouble my own, I realized my utter ruination: for here was effort. How I had struggled, how I had fought to craft this false symmetry, when the very life it strived to reflect had been free, organic, formed like the dream of the heaven cloud, created as life, as living – a product not of labour, but of simple existence. In short, I saw at last that the beauty of the original days, not a mirror but a reality, was far beyond replication. My emotions, my seas, scarcely stirred, were hollow imitations, at once toxic for their sordid mimicry of the pure. Sickened by the pleasure I had gained from such base, none mirrors, and appalled, stunned at how gratified I had been with dull, empty moments when once a grandiose life had existed, I recoiled. All is gone, gone, I thought – vanished beyond any fictitious reflection.

And then I saw the mirrors, riddled with an infinity of venomous cracks. All around they hung and hovered – lying, false, distorting, nothing mirrors, whose symmetry was all of twisted mockery: a parody. And then I saw my mirror of a million fragments, my hollow, treacherous vessel, which existed only to taunt at loss, at difference. I knew at last, what to do, and drawing my gun I shot through the traitorous glass and the bullet found myself.