through the looking glass

Have you ever looked into the mirror one morning and wondered, much like Alice daydreamed on a hot summer day – if a world exists beyond the fringes of the reflection, or if it is truly a reflection at all, or if – like us – the reflection that we see is not a reflection at all, but we are a reflection of it and it will walk away and live it’s life beyond the horizons of the mirror that we imagine may exist? If we could only peer around corners, or set up enough mirrors angled to refract any sign that there is life existing apart from our own engine, that the person that we see won’t cease to exist when we leave the path of the mirror. Wouldn’t it be strange if one day, as you washed your face or put in your contacts, you began to turn away and sensed distinctly that, for a mere fraction of a second, the hand in the mirror lagged behind your own. You would perhaps take the contact lens out, wash it again, and put it back in your eye, hoping that it was a mistake, that the anomaly you just thought you witnessed was a trick of light or a wrinkle in your lens. And you would try, with all scientific reasoning, to duplicate the event. Have you ever found yourself in one of those elevators rimmed with reflective glass, peering uncannily at yourself copied dozens of times over, and thought if you could just see far enough down the line, you might notice a you with some imperfection. Imagining again the doppelganger that exists when you walk away from the mirror – suppose every imperfection of reflective action is merely imperceptible, and that for every mirror in every reflection these imperfections accumulate, until finally in some variable world, you exist as an antithesis of yourself as you know it.

Sometimes I feel that everything seems so sufficiently skewed to conclude that somehow, ostensibly, I have stepped into the skin of another me, and that I am now perceiving the world of my reflection.