Through The Looking Glass

In the fractured mirror of my mind, I still see reflections of you—haunting, persistent, and more monstrous than I ever realized.

I.

I despise this time of year,

those wretched, garish blue Christmas lights are everywhere.

They claw at the recesses of my mind,

dragging me back to your invasion,

your assault—body, soul, and beyond.

I am still afraid of shadows

that dance too close in the dark,

afraid of the echoes of you

I never invited, never wanted.

You’re far from me now—geographically.

But the labyrinth you carved in my mind

is a place I cannot leave.

Through the cracked mirror of memory,

you loom larger, more grotesque,

a distorted nightmare that feels truer than the waking world.

In my dreams, I do not scream.

I only stare—wide-eyed, frozen—

as terror seeps into the corners of my being,

the dark pooling like ink spilled across my chest.

Through the looking glass, I can see you are no human.

I used to love monsters,

those paper-thin fears of childhood.

Ghosts could be banished with a light,

the warmth of my parents' embrace.

But now I know the truth:

nothing terrifies more than human hands,

human intentions.

The things we can do to each other—

the unmaking, the unraveling—

are beyond what even monsters can imagine.

When I was a child,

I could run, I could hide.

There was safety in numbers,

in believing the wicked lived outside my door.

Now, I find myself in love

with the monster beneath my bed.

And no words can untangle this heartbreak,

this impossible contradiction.

There are only two ways

to make sense of what you’ve done.

One casts you as a predator,

a creature of pure malice,

soulless and empty—a terror for anyone in your path.

The other keeps you human—

still monstrous, still cruel—

but tangled in your own chaos,

hurting me not as a stranger,

but as me.

Why, then, do I cling to the second story,

the one where you might still have a heart?

Even though it leaves me bleeding,

even though it burns me alive?

Why do I crave to believe in your humanity,

to wrap your cruelty in my own naivety,

to suffer as though I somehow deserved it?

How much more will I bleed for you willingly?

And how much more will you willingly drain my life force away?

How much of myself will I give—

willingly, endlessly—

to keep you less horrifying?

And how much will you take—

coldly, casually—

until there’s nothing left of me?

And still, you smile.

With your disarming, infuriating innocence,

you ask me, “What did I ever do to you?”

And I, a shell of civility,

smile back, my voice a whisper of frost:

If you could feel what you’ve done to me,

you’d never need to ask.

This isn’t about any heartbreak (I wish I was sane enough to focus on that),

this isn’t a story of love lost.

This is survival in the wreckage you left behind.

And yet, I wonder—

why do I still want to salvage

something

anything

from this ruin?

When will I finally have enough and accept there's no survivors in the crash?

II.

I don’t know why you want to help,

but it made me happy, if only for a moment.

I wish you could.

I wish you could give me back my heart

the way I once returned it to you—

whole, trembling, alive, innocent.

But you didn’t just break it;

you threw it down,

crushed it beneath your feet,

and scattered its dust to the wind

all the while staring at me with a smile on your face.

Now, my heart doesn’t exist in any form.

It’s gone, a phantom ache,

a hollow space where life once thrived.

I don’t know whether to weep or laugh,

to marvel or collapse—

that through all my grief,

I somehow earned the pity of the one

who ripped me apart.

What kind of grief must this be,

to invite sympathy from the very hands

that inflicted the wound?

How must it look from the outside,

this sorrow of mine,

to warrant compassion from you?

But inside, it burns—

a twisted, searing irony

I know you will never understand.

I wish I could believe the truths about you

as easily as you believed the lies about me.

But some truths are mountains,

immovable and cruel,

and I am too weary and broken to climb.

I wear this grief like a signature,

an ode to the depths of love

I once held in my fragile heart.

And yet, I am startled—

you feel something for me now,

something like empathy.

It’s more than I expected.

But tell me—

what am I to do with your puddle of sympathy

when I am drowning in oceans of grief?

© 2024 Inaba Tarek