One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.
Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth. My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom. I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell. I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.
I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours. I need to see what my face says. What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.
Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty. I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body. Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself. My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.
I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin. I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living. I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.
I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see. My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized. I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe. I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.
My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early. My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes. Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.
So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees. I reach my fingers out to feel her face. My eyes cannot get over it. They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back? Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass. It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.
Julie Gregory
My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.
It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.
Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.
There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.
When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.
In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes. Nothing.
It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.
Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.
I M Perfect lady 