I can’t stand my reflection.
You can’t understand how hard it is to look in the mirror and feel such monumental disappointment. Every time our eyes meet, the loathing increases. Wasted, I think. So much incredible potential wasted.
Tradition holds that each person has the option to approach the mirror on their 25th birthday, to look into the eyes of their reflection. Not everyone does, which leads to its own disappointment. Some of the hardest moments I’ve faced have come during late night conversations with friends who looked not into the eyes of their reflections, but instead into the blackness of an empty mirror. Unwanted, unloved, by someone who is a near replica of themselves.
That would have been better. Much, much better.
I remember the day. The crew had been planning around the day for months, finishing up our latest heist to give us plenty of time to stash the take, tuck away our aliases and get to Central City. Maybe it was foolish, but my whole life I had wondered at the possibility of two of me. Two criminal masterminds. Two brilliant, driven women capable of bringing others to their cause, creating new and innovative schemes to control and mainpulate a weak and slavish world.
It was too much temptation to resist.
So, we made the journey and at 1:47pm I entered the queue for the mirror. At the exact moment of my birth I stepped into the room and with giddy anticipation walked forward to the portal to meet the alternative me — exactly me, with one small difference. One inverted part of me. Just like a reflection.
I’ll never forget that moment, realizing that she came and staring at myself in the blackness. Looking into her eyes I knew we would be linked forever, never again needing the mirror to connect. After today, she and I would build the strongest criminal enterprise either world had ever seen. I never anticipated the one thing that could ruin my plans.
My reflection was a goddamn rule follower.
We’ve talked every day since that moment and my reflection has all of my intellect. She’s great at strategy, collaborative as anyone could ever want and the team trusts her now at least as much as me. But she refuses to do anything unethical or immoral. I pushed her once, just to see how tightly she was wound. She refused to so much as pirate a movie off the internet.
It would be bad enough, just knowing that all of that mastermind potential was trapped behind her goodie goodie nature, but it’s worse than that. It’s the lectures, the daily lectures about how I should be using my talents for good. Every frickin’ day she drones on and on because just like me she is a ridiculously persistent.
No one knows, before the mirror, what they will see. Whether their reflection will bring joy or pain, love or hate, peace or heartache. All I wanted was world domination and I couldn’t for a minute see the one small thing, the one inversion would stop me.
Morals.
Too Much Mel 