C'est La Mort

It was a 3'x4' sheet of silvered glass I picked up at a garage sale for five dollars. I'm assuming it spent the first part of its reflective life on someone's bathroom wall before it came to live with me. I kept it in a storage room for a while before it commanded to be put on watch over the naked minutiae of daily life this house has to offer. Blood, sweat, tears, laughter, sex, death, all of it. The mirror saw, yet kept a polite distance reflecting only the ceiling from most perspectives. Like a watchful eye with a perpetually skyward whistle.


When the house demo/rebuild happened and I was going to need a new paint color in the living room the mirror expressed to me some anxiety. Everytime I looked at it thinking I should move it for painting it told me it would break.


Move = Break rang in my head.


It might be weird that I think inanimate objects express feelings in my direction. But I couldn't help it.


I enlisted help to get the mirror down because I remember putting it up by myself and that caused more than a couple panicked hyperventilating moments. I mean, it weighed more than 50 pounds and I had to balance it up a ladder and over my head to get it on its perch over the fireplace. How I managed that without a trip to the ER is still mysterious to me.


So it got down fine enough and it rested against a wall or a sofa or another wall or wherever was most convenient at the time. And each time someone moved it for practical reasons they explained how it had to be moved or else it would break.


 Move/Break. It was a thing. Not just me.


So somehow the mirror got moved against a kitchen wall to be out of the way. Which was probably the stupidest place since that particular wall gets the very most traffic in the house of all the places and when I heard the thrashing shatterous noise of glass against the floor from around the corner I wasn't at all surprised. Just disappointed in the careless way the mirror finally got dead. I guess I expected a more glorious exit. 


Death doesn't always happen with glorious. Sometimes things just die.


I picked up the pieces of mirror as best I could. Plates, shards, slivers, dust. I saved a lot of them in a box to make a mosiac because I think the mirror reflected a significant part of my life that shouldn't just be tossed out. It should be made into something pretty. So I maybe might cover a planter with it or whatever. Whatever it is is going to live outside. I think whatever the mirror absorbed probably needs to not be in the house anymore.

It was what it was and it's gone. It's meant to be something different now. And that's fine too.