The Happy Mirror

I enter the dimly lit space. My room, a sanctuary of ethnicity, a life I would love but have yet to receive. I walk forward toward my new purchase. A reflection of the oil lamp in the corner burns the image of my face on the intricate mirror I have bought from the second hand store down the road for fifty cents. What is this mystery that made me buy this old ugliness in the first place? As I look at it, I am taken back to a time when candles burned, their wax dripping down their sides, displaying time not with a tick, but a trickle.... the calling of a life not so follied... a time when the heart would think rather than be rushed by reason. I look toward the edges of the mirror, vaguely realizing that I am not the focal. The work that is beyond my face, the frame, designed by human hands, stands out more than my two eyes, nose and mouth. This mirror seems to call for justice in the depth of its beautiful creation, to be noticed and to be touched. Looking at it more closely, I move my fingers beneath the edges. Worn, dustfilled, and made of formica, it resembles an aged wood, knarled and beaten. My fingers find a hidden clasp, and I open the mirror without hesitation, as though my hand knows what creation and image lies underneath.
And so the mirror opens.
"Hello" speaks the image from behind the silver shine, 'how worthy of you to drop by." I stare at the voice whispering to me. It smiles, and I do not smile back. "I am Happiness." I am driven into the recesses of my mind, the words twirl about and come to their own, hurried conclusion. This is nothing to me but happiness masquerading as 'God is dead.' Her orange dress reveals nothing but the expression of a crescent sun on the boundaries of the earth, flowing into the ocean as the day says goodnight to its people.
"Why have you come here?" The words coarse through me, angry, as though Happiness does not have a place behind my mirror, beyond the reflection of myself. I am startled by my own willingness to talk in such an odd situation. Happiness speaking to me from behind an ugly mirror.
"Do you really want to know?" Her voice smoothes over me..."because I will only tell you the truth." I wrap my mind around the word that has so often caused me trouble, suffering, heartache. Truth? This happy voice was going to offer me truth?
I reply with a stubbling okay. Not something profound, nor heartwrenching, just the language of my time.
She is pale, like a fresh ivory soap my grandmother would give to me when I came to visit, the smell reminding me of a fresh air all to forgotten by my self. I have not visited Grandma for over a month.
I return my mind toward that which is in front of me. Happiness looks to be havoced by a wind more twisted than that of my soul when it has loved. Her hair is white, shining. I can only compare it to that of the sun when it breaks through the clouds and you realize, once again, that there is a God. But as it shines, it is uncontrollable. I am reminded of my family, who sits in the next room, quiet, withdrawn, people so unlike me but masked in their own beauty, something so not of this world. Something I have tried so hard to change. Something so out of my control....
She reaches her hands to me. Crackling rings, guided by silver and gold, diamonds and gems, beautiful in their richness. "I am telling you the truth..." she takes my hands and removes my rings. I am dumbfounded. These are a part of me. She takes a ring I wear as a symbol and speaks to me, her voice more audible than before. "This," she stops in mid sentence, lifting my face to peer into her neverending eyes "is nothing." She takes the ring and releases it behind me, the deep clip and clang of it dropping into nothingness resounds in my ears, like the roar of the ocean in my ears when I have brokendown and not talked for two days.
She continues to look at me, or through me I should say, into the presence of my soul that is shadowed and outlined by the masks of my making, the charcoal that smudges me and makes me unclean. "I am Happiness" she repeats, and without me having to tell her impatiently that I already know this, she continues. "I am the Happiness without the laughter, the joy without the I, and the reflection of a people all too long forgotten."
What she says frightens me. I close the mirror, wishng to see my familiar self, but images of people swirling in my mind, memories of those who I have loved have replaced it.
It was a week and half ago when I cleaned an elderly womans room. Why should I think of this now? Why remember her among those I have longed to forget? I resist the resistance, and let my memories guide me. She had spoken to me quietly, from beneath the expanse of her burdensome afghan blanket, cloaked by age but renewed by the spirit of the Word sitting on her dresser. I had stood before her, in all of my glorious youth, my latex gloves on and my cleaner in one hand, already squelching away my years in a job I hated.
I found myself removed from my being and willed myself to look into her cataract eyes, eyes that had seen so much and yet still seemed to seek out more. She looked at me and reached her shaky hand. I smiled at her and asked her the question of normalacy. "How are you today?" She responded quietly, but with an authority that threw me.
"I am so lonesome." She had gazed at me, with blind eyes, wishing for the housekeeper to sit with her and talk for a few brief moments, to relieve her from the mundane, to give her the right of humanity again. And suddenly I was hit with the roundabout knowledge that she was not room 203. She is not, was not, and shall not be just room 203.
I am scared at my own feelings, and I back away, telling her I am sorry, forcing myself to be cheery, to clean her room and get out because I am too uncomfortable. This is far too honest.
Startling me back to the reality of the present, an unleashed Happiness pokes her head out from behind the frame of the formica mirror I have bought for fifty cents at the second hand store down the road. She smiles and tugs at a tendril of brown hair that falls off in her fingers. "You found me," she whispers through a breezy smile.
I ask no more questions. I do not ask Happiness why she has come for I understand her now.... at last, I have been forgotten.