The Mirror's Long Memory
鏡の長い記憶
In the drawing room hung a mirror so old its silver had corroded into a permanent grey twilight.
It returned the room faithfully enough, but it returned me, I began to feel, with certain revisions.
The woman in the glass moved when I moved, yet always a heartbeat late, as if reluctantly obeying.
She wore my face, my mourning dress, my weariness; and she wore, besides, an expression I had never risked.
Where I was guarded, she was candid; where I concealed, she confessed; where I forgot, she plainly remembered.
A ought to be a servant, faithful and mute, presuming nothing beyond the surface it repeats.
This one presumed a great deal, and its had the calm authority of an older acquaintance.
The , I have read, is that which should have remained hidden but has instead come to light.
And nothing is more than a familiar face regarded until it turns, quietly, into a stranger's.
I told myself the silver merely distorted, as glass will always distort a patient face.
But distortion is symmetrical and stupid; this was selective, intelligent, and unmistakably addressed to me.
One evening she raised her hand before I raised mine, and I understood the order had reversed.
I was no longer the woman casting the ; I had become the of some prior, truer self.
She was the one who had stayed, that night, when I had fled; she had made the braver choice.
She had kept the letters I had burned; she had spoken the words I had swallowed and buried.
In her, everything I had refused to be had gone on quietly living, accruing a separate history.
, the physicians would say, begins when the self can no longer agree on where its borders fall.
Yet what they call felt to me like an overdue and terrible act of honesty.
The mirror did not lie; it had simply kept a longer memory than the woman standing before it.
Night after night I returned to it, half in dread and half in a longing I could not .
To meet one's double is to be told, without mercy, the sum of all one's small evasions.
She never spoke; she did not need to; her steadiness was itself the most accusation.
And slowly, as autumn deepened, I could no longer say with confidence which of us was the copy.
Perhaps, I thought, the house had not been haunting me at all, but patiently returning me to myself.
Perhaps every mirror in Ellenmoor was a door, and every door a mirror, and I the threshold between.
On the last night I approached the glass and, for the first time, did not flinch from her gaze.
I lifted my hand; she lifted hers; and this time, precisely together, our palms met upon the cold surface.
And in the instant they touched, I could not have told you whose side of the glass I stood upon.