Fiction: Reflections On Temperance
By Cayden Robbins
My room has a coffee table, with a
red cushion on either side. There are many kinds of tea that I can make, but I
don’t always want to drink tea. I have a box full of CDs I like, but it gets
annoying to have the music on all the time.
I don’t ever know what time it is.
There’s a window, and I’ve looked outside before, but I don’t quite recall what
was there. I could look again, but I don’t want to—looking out means that
everything else can look in. When I am tired, I go to sleep. My mattress is on
the floor because I chose not to have a bed frame. When I stop being tired,
sometimes I wake up.
One of my walls is a mirror. I know
somebody who lives inside of it. He likes to copy what I do, when I am making
good choices. When I make mistakes, it is because I was copying him. I have to
sometimes, to keep things fair, but it really makes me glad I’m not him.
Brain Stew. Green Day.
Jin Jun Mei: A red tea.
I am sitting in quarter lotus
position on a cushion, turned away from the table.
Right now, it is his turn to copy
me. He is pulling it off well, aside from the fact that he looks nothing like
me. He has sunken eyes, greasy hair, and his ribs are showing. However, I will
concede that he is a tremendous actor. I’ve decided to let him have a
turn.
Copying his movements, I turned off
the CD player, and stared at the mirror for a while. Ten minutes pass. Does he
know it is still his turn? Finally, I am beginning to move again. He had moved
first, of course.
He did something else with the rest
of his turn. Don’t ask me what, because I can’t remember. If you want to know,
you should not ask me, because I do not know.
He is done now, so I am going to
bed. I could have stopped playing, but it must be tough to be stuck in a
mirror, living your whole life in that box. I can see the confines he is
trapped in. They seem miniscule. Does it make me a bad person to admit that I
wouldn’t trade places with him, even if I were held at knifepoint?
I don’t like knives.
Does it make me a bad person to
admit that I wouldn’t trade places with him, even if I were held at gunpoint?
That’s better. I said that, instead.
A new day. By this, I simply mean
that I slept.
I dreamt that my room had a door. I
didn’t open it, which I now realize was a mistake; I wish to know what lay
beyond. This means that even in dreams, evidently I spend time copying the man
in the mirror—entertaining him, I’d guess, as a form of charity.
Of course, my real room has no
doors. However, there is a window. This I know. Today, I will open the
window.
I will open the window.
I am going to open the
window.
Why am I not opening the window?
I turn around and look at the
mirror. Just as I thought, our movements are the same once again. But this
time, I am being forced to copy him. We have never forced each other to do
anything before. I dislike that he can do this. Why does he care so much about
the window? What does it matter if other people can see me? Him. What does it
matter if other people can see him?
All I know is that he wishes to
upset the balance due to envy. But if he thinks he will get to control me
without a fight, he will be in for a rude awakening.
I stopped looking at the mirror. I
spent more time asleep. In dreams, where he cannot see me, and I cannot see
him. I was winning, I could tell. However, mistakes happen to everyone. As I
rubbed the sleep from my eyes one day, I happened to lock eyes with him from
across the room. He had been resting, too.
Startled, we both rush to climb out
of bed and each make our way across our rooms, until we are back at the mirror.
I am not caught off guard, but he manages to overpower me anyway. I don’t
remember what happened after—
—that.
“Yes, you do.” He is using my voice
to talk. A sore loser. That is all he is. A sore loser.
“How creative. First I’m the
scapegoat for all your mistakes, and now the source of all your problems. Who
are you even talking to? Yourself? If you want to do that, the mirror’s right
here.” Stop it. Liar.
“Why do you care, anyway? Won’t you
‘forget’ that this happened, too? You were saying it yourself, to someone.”
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
“But of course we both know that
isn’t true. And no door? Get real.” I begin to cry. I do not like the sound,
but I do not turn on the CD player to drown it out.
“Worst of all is this. Here. Right
now. This magic mirror bullshit. There’s not another you that can just take all
the bad away, leaving you with the good. Look what happened when you tried to
do that. What it did to you.”
I remain silent.
“No you don’t. Who do you think’s
been talking? I told you, there’s no magic mirror. No dichotomy between good
and evil. No boundary between your room and the rest of the world.” I have been
curious about what is outside, more and more as of late. What is inside stays
the same, yet becomes scarier and scarier. I look to the left.
“I can see the door now.”
“Well, alright. Time to do more
than talk to yourself about it.”
I look back in front of me, and the
reflection I see is just that: a reflection. Nothing more than rays of light
taking a roundabout route to my eyes. I look at myself. Not evil. Definitely
not good. Just what I see.
At the moment, I see someone that
needs to take a shower.
I walk to the door, grab the
doorknob, twist and pull.
Cayden Robbins is a PSU student who enjoys the
simple things: chess, making music, raising insects, and of course, writing.
Most of his work circles around identity and humanity.