She opens the door to the attic. Long forgotten but recently remembered. It felt like this place had not seen a living soul, or use, in decades. The attic had been frozen in time. Her grandmother’s wedding dress, always a source of play in her childhood, sat limp and lifeless on the mannequin. A heavy layer of dust turning the once pristine white color an ugly gray. A broken mirror, smashed by her mother, sits behind it, hidden from view. An untold pain lurking in its cracks and fragments. This was a place filled with memories.
“Mom and dad really kept everything.” She murmurs to the empty room. She picks her way past unlabeled boxes and musty fabric to the window. The cobwebs hanging have too been long abandoned and break easily under the wave of a hand. Nowhere else does the true age and solitude of the room reflect than in the grime finely coated on the glass. “I guess even cleaning up here became too much for her.”
The cracked mirror lurks in the corner of her eye. Looking at it, she stares at the distorted image of herself and thinks. It is hard to look at it. The screaming of mother and daughter. The shaking of shoulders. The whipping of something across the room and sickening crack of the mirror breaking.
“Get out!” Her father had said after seeing the room. “You know not to provoke her! Get out!” So, she left, walked out the front door and drove all the way back to campus. She never bothered looking back. Never thought about the mirror. Never missed their presence.
Her brother called, a year later. “She’s dead.” The funeral was the day of her graduation. She smiled as she walked across the stage, knowing her brother was somewhere in the crowd watching. She didn’t let how much it hurt show. She took her diploma, smiled for the camera, and walked off the stage towards the attic.
She’s back in the attic. The sounds of a father and brother packing down below are muffled. She breathes and stares at the mirror only to find her mother reflected back in the distortion. Her smile, her hair, her dimples. Her temper. She is her mother. She is everything she did not want to be. She feels blood boil, looking around for anything to throw at the glass, screaming “I am better than you!” The raised voices of a pointless argument haunt her. The image of friends standing wide-eyed and frightened slows her. She was not better.
But she has something her mother didn’t. The memory of something being thrown. The fear of being hurt. She looks at the mirror, seeing herself. This was a place of memories. This was a place of pain. This is where she would start to be better.