Curate, connect, and discover
love your writing! could you do some more for ralbert?
Aaaa thank you!!! I’m so sorry that this took so long, school has been beating me up lately, lol. Enjoy this little bit of rambling!
There’s a crack in the mirror in Albert and Race’s home.
Neither are quite sure how it got there- perhaps a box was dropped onto it during moving and hit the glass a bit too hard, perhaps one of them had bumped into it and just didn’t remember- but it’s been there for as long as the two of them can tell you. It was there when they signed the lease on the house, it was there when they came home one day with a shining bundle of joy in their arms, after years of waiting, and it’ll be there when the time comes to put the mirror away.
When you stand in front of it, your view of your reflection is distorted a bit where the glass has chipped. Right above your heart lies a star-shaped crack, your skin seeming fragile and broken underneath it. Both Albert and Race have looked into this mirror hundreds of times, a quick glance on the way out to run an errand or for several minutes as they laughed at the faces their kids made in it.
Their youngest barely comes up to the crack, a little puncture mark poked into his face when he passes by. He laughs when he sees it, brushing his hand just close enough to feel the groove where the mirror’s broken, smiling at his reflection.
Race has to blink tears from his eyes when he sees this, his beautiful child so happy with what he saw in that glass. Albert isn’t so lucky- he’s always been sentimental anyways. It had taken a long time for the two of them to find that, for their own reflections to not punch a hole through their heart.
Their children won’t ever have to suffer through those long years of waiting before freedom, trapped in the hopeless purgatory of no support before they finally get the courage to stand up. That mirror will never haunt them. Their names will not be a source of pain. They’ll never be afraid to be who they were- both Race and Albert had promised that long before they’d first adopted.
For now, that mirror will distort their children’s faces, hear their giggles as they stick out their tongues at the warped image. As they grow, they’ll fall into the same routine, ignoring that old crack in the glass as they fix their jacket or comb through their hair, the slight bend in light unnoticeable now. Their hearts will break, just like the glass, and be mended together again with some sort of miracle. When they leave their childhood home, that mirror will watch, still the same as ever yet having bore witness to the molding of two human beings, just as it had done before. They’ll come home for holidays and birthdays, funerals and reunions, their fingerprints left on the mirror and wiped off again, like when they were little.
Sooner rather than later, it’ll become no longer useful, and it will sit in a basement or old antique shop, slowly staining and losing its light. It will heave its final, weak breath, the memories made lost to time and decay, to all except those who lived it- those who still dream of the time spent in that house, with that mirror.
That glass may one day be broken, but those men and their family? They never will be.