The Beat of Another

The Beat of Another

It is night. A man stands alone in a dark alleyway grasping within his fingers a mirror. His reflection glares back at him.

You shuffle your feet and shift your eyes away because it hurts.

He sees an ugly mess.

You sink like a stone in silence.

Gentle whispering voices evolve into shrill screams calling him to action.

You stand tall. Reach your arms forward and outstretch your fingers. Arms drop. Your whole body falters. Collapses.

The man hates mirrors. They always seem to mock him. Taunt everything that he is.  He rubs his face. The skin feels rough- full of craters and scars- painful reminders of his youth. He wishes he could pluck out his eyes and remove himself from his own critical gaze.

Your body trembles. Melts like wax. Dripping. Drip. Drip. You fade away.

But he knows he can’t. Mirrors will always exist. So he’s learned to just not look. But today is an exception. Today, he stares on into his big empty eyes, open sockets without purpose, and becomes lost. The mirror sucks him in.

You spring forward. Sprint. Freeze. Retreat, and fall to the ground….

In his youth, the man told himself he yearned for freedom, but he now knows this was not true. For freedom brought with it public scrutiny, judgments he could not bear.

You bend your knees. Grasp your head. Shake. Shake. Shake.

He’d rather drift away, enslaved by chance, and embrace an attitude of indifference. One where we felt nothing. One where he was nothing.  A life of imitation. Day by day. Detail by detail.

Arms swing through space.

In the dead and dark early hours of morning, he always emerges from his house and meets in this very same place. Tall brick apartment buildings tower off into the sky surrounding him on either side cloaking his tiny figure in shadows. 

You compress your body into a ball and rock back and forth.

He loves the darkness. The deadness. The sweet silence of night. For only in these moments can he be at peace, can the chaos of the world fade away, can he sit back and be released.

Your legs sprout from underneath slowly kicking out. One by one. One by one. You fall to the ground. Slam your hands to the floor.

The shadows dance. As always, he follows suit. Imitates their movements, the pulsing rhythms they produce.  He does as he’s been taught. Conforms.  No questions asked.

Stillness.

Trapped in a series of loops, I am. Circle after circle after circle. Going through the motions. Moving to the beat of someone else’s rhythm. I do not move verbs, but verbs move me. Like a mindless puppet, my limp body dangles. Heart thumps, thumps, thumps. But I ignore. Ravage me as you will.

The shadows feed me their energy, and I consume it. They command, I obey. I become one with the shadows, drift through the stale night air in a detached silence as only a phantom of something greater. A dismal representation of lost potential. The product of conformity.

 And so, my health declines, and the beat of my heart grows silent as my body deteriorates slowly. And the universe drifts on; as do I, at its whims, move slowly through time. Alive, but dead inside, dancing to the beat of another.

The man’s eyes are full of tears. The mirror sets him on fire, burns his tender skin, and laughs at the blaze. He yearns to slam the mirror to the floor and shatter it.

You can’t.