“What you label yourself you become.”
THESE MIRRORS HAVE become nothing but windows of pain. Each time I look into one, I sink further into an abyss of regret.
“Where am I now and why can’t I remember getting here?” I mutter, having no idea if there’s even anyone to hear me.
I look around feeling as if I just woke from a deep sleep. The room is square with four brick walls. The cold concrete floor I’m sitting on causes a shiver to crawl up my back. I get up and slowly make my way over to one of the walls. Upon further inspection, I realize there are words randomly scrawled out on some of the bricks. In bold black I see so many words: fat, ugly, perfect, loser, thief, beautiful, skinny, happy, funny, angry, hateful, annoying, and worthless. They go on and on. I can’t make any sense of it. There aren’t just negative or positive words on them. It’s a mixture of both.
“How many of these lies have you told, Riah? How many of these words are labels you placed upon yourself or your family and friends?”
He’s back, whoever
he
is. I turn around but don’t see the long-haired man I saw before. It’s the exact same voice, yet this time, the man is short and pale-skinned with a receding hairline. I’m more than confused.
“Are you…you? I mean…are you the same person as before, or is there one universal voice here?”
He smiles, and right then I know it’s the same person, yet not. The eyes and the smile are oddly exactly the same as the person’s before.
“I take on a number of different forms. Just like in life, you’re all made up of many different people, even though what makes us human is all very much the same.”
“But are you…human?” I ask.
His smile widens. “Not anymore.”
His response gives me chills and I shiver. I look around at the brick wall and ask, “What is all of this? What does it mean? How do I ever find the key? I feel like I’m making no progress.”
He clasps his hands together and smiles. “Your Key Keeper will come. Trust, Riah. You’re making more progress than you even know.”
“My Key Keeper?”
“Yes, everyone has a Key Keeper. The Key Keepers have come before you. Each human being on Earth is tied to their Key Keeper by an invisible flow of energy. Some believe it’s an unwavering pathway of love. They wait for you to arrive, and when you do, they stand at the end of your journey in the Reflection Realm with your key. Once you find them, you find your key, and they accompany you through your door, should you choose to open it.”
I frown. “Some choose to not open their door? Why?”
His face relaxes into an expression of sadness. “Unfortunately, not all can choose to let go of their regrets, their past. You met Philomena. She is one who chose to forgo her door. She can’t make peace with her past. Nor can she forgive her regrets.”
“That’s sad,” I whisper, feeling awful for those such as Philomena. I don’t want to be like her. I want to let go. I thought that’s what I was doing when I chose death. I had no idea how wrong I was.
“You asked about this wall. I will tell you about it. This is another step in your journey. As you look at the labels here on this wall, you will recognize some and not others. These labels can give you insight. I urge you to seek it.”
“How? How do I do that?” I ask, confused yet again.
He reaches out for my hand, and as soon as we touch, comforting warmth spreads from my fingertips, up my arm, and throughout my body. He extends our hands out toward the wall and places mine on the brick that is labeled
perfect
and then moves my hand to the brick above it that is labeled
annoying
. Both bricks crumble into a fine dust that falls to our feet. A hole is left where the bricks once were, and I see my neighbor, Darcy. My brows thread together and I look over to the short, balding man.
“I don’t understand,” I murmur.
He nods his head in the direction of the vision of Darcy and says, “Oh, but you will. Just watch and you will soon understand.”
And with that he’s gone. I lean forward and look through the opening. It’s Darcy. She’s in her bathroom, standing at her sink holding a stick of some sort. I look more closely and realize it’s a pregnancy test. Tears are streaming down her face, and her hands are unsteady. Her right eye is purple. I wonder what happened to her. She’s also not wearing any makeup, which is strange. I’ve never seen Darcy not perfectly put together. She leans back against the bathroom door and slides to the floor.
Hurling the pregnancy test across the room and looking up at the ceiling, she screams, “Why? Why can’t I have a baby of my own?”
A baby of her own?
I don’t understand. She has a beautiful daughter whom she obsesses over.
Darcy slowly gets up and wipes the tears from her face and bends down, picking up the pregnancy test and pitching it in the trashcan. She then makes her way to her bedroom, where she kneels down beside her bed and reaches for something beneath it. I watch intently. She pulls a large glass bottle out. I squint trying to read the label.
Vodka.
“No way?” I say out loud, talking to myself.
There’s an empty glass on her nightstand. She pours the clear liquid in it until it reaches the very top. Screwing the lid back on the bottle, she leans down and slides it back under her bed, and then stands up and sits on the side of her bed. She begins to drink the vodka, and the ease with which she consumes nearly half the glass in one drink is shocking to me. It’s as if she’s drinking water. Quickly she finishes off the glass, and then her phone rings. She looks at the screen and takes a deep breath.
“Hi, honey,” she answers.
It must be Roger, her husband.
“Yes, I know. I got your list. I’ll pick up your dry cleaning and do everything else you asked before you get home, I promise.”
Her voice is different from what I’m accustomed to. She sounds so submissive and demure.
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry about yesterday.”
She pauses and nods her head.
“Yes, honey, I know you didn’t mean it,” she whispers, reaching up and touching the bruise beneath her eye.
Oh my God. Roger hits her?
I’m in disbelief.
“Okay, yes. I love you, too.”
She places the phone on the bed and her bottom lip begins to quiver. One tear falls from her eye, and she quickly wipes it away and stands up.
“He loves you, Darcy. It was just one of his bad days. We just had a bad day. I drank too much and I forgot a few things he needed me to do, that’s all,” she mumbles to herself, pacing back and forth in her bedroom.
She walks over, pulls open the drawer on her nightstand, and gets a small calendar out. She sighs and grabs a pen marking a large X over the day that reads,
Test
. Flipping back through the calendar, there’s a big X on the same day of each previous month. I guess she has been trying to get pregnant for some time now. She drops the calendar back into the drawer and then pulls out what looks like a journal. Putting pen to paper, Darcy begins to write. Strangely, I can very clearly see what she’s writing.
It doesn’t look like I’ll ever have the baby I want. It doesn’t seem that I’ll ever have the marriage I want. I know he loves me, but his “bad days” are becoming more and more lately. And the more bad days he has, the more drinking I do. I love our little Riley, but nothing replaces the hole I feel inside me, or the yearning there is within me for a baby of my own. It continually makes me feel like a failure as a woman.
I try so hard to be the best I can be at everything I do as a mother and wife. I do it all so obsessively to a point of exhaustion. Alcohol is my only reprieve from the pressure of it all. I know I need to quit. I just can’t. I need it. I can’t make it without it. Today I have so many things to do, and I of course have to do them all well. I have an appearance and image to uphold. Some days I look at women like my neighbor, Riah, and I’m jealous. She seems so confident in who she is. She can leave her house in sweat pants and no makeup without a care in the world, and the very thought of walking out my door like that gives me such immense anxiety that it physically sickens me. I see her husband outside playing with their two beautiful children, children who she had the gift of carrying for nine months, and I feel so much envy. Roger never plays with Riley. He resents her. I had to beg and plead for him to agree to adoption, yet he still looks at me as the woman who can’t give him a child of our own.
I wonder if women like Riah know how lucky they are to be mothers, to have carried life inside them. I wonder if they know what a gift they were given to be able to give birth to their babies.
She stops writing and I’m sobbing. Darcy, my neighbor, the woman I have envied for years, is not at all the person I thought she was. I have avoided her on so many occasions, and the guilt of that is overwhelming right now. Seeing into her life, behind closed doors, I realize I’ve never known who Darcy really is. The perfect husband I thought she had, who was home by five o’ clock every evening, wasn’t perfect at all. I would watch him pull into their driveway each evening and feel a tinge of jealousy because Grayson never got home by five. I would always think how nice it would be to have my husband at the dinner table each and every night. Little did I know, Roger may have been home for dinner every night, but he also hit his wife and, from what I can tell, isn’t someone she looks forward to seeing each night.
I step back from the opening in the wall and drop my head. I shake it from side to side.
“Nothing is what it seems,” I say.
“Very true,” I hear someone from behind me say.
I turn and see the short, balding man again. I wipe the tears from my eyes and say, “I was so wrong, so very wrong about Darcy. I was awful to her. I avoided her every chance I had, and she probably needed a friend, a real friend.”
“You see, Riah, in life we never know the battles others are facing. We don’t know the demons they are hiding. Everyone you have ever met is fighting something. You may have thought no one could’ve had the kind of raw deal you were dealt in life, being ailed with a mental illness, yet the truth is, many have the same or worse problems than that of your own. You judged Darcy and you shunned her. You labeled her. So you see, Riah, no one is perfect regardless of how perfect the surface of who they are might be. Her façade annoyed you, and now her reality saddens you.”
I scan the wall and all of the labels.
“I’m scared,” I cry. “What if I’ve been wrong about everything, everyone. I’m a dreadful person.”
“No, you’re not. You’re human. It’s the human condition to judge, to make mistakes, but now you must see the error of your ways, acknowledge them and make peace with them.”
I nod and scan the wall further. My gaze immediately falls upon the word
unforgiving
. Forgiveness is something I was never able to give Grayson. It was almost as if every tiny wrong move he ever made was a tally mark in a book in the back of my mind where I kept score. Every argument we ever had, I would open that book and hurl past mistakes at him. With every one I threw his way, it was like a verbal stoning, and I never once felt regret for it. He deserved it, I believed. I was the victim, I thought. Now, I’m not so sure. Nothing is as it seemed now that I’m here seeing things from a different perspective.
With a shaky hand, I reach out and place it against the cold,
unforgiving
brick. Just as the brick before fell away, this one does the same, but the brick above it that reads
loving
and the one below it that reads
sad
fall away too. Like a series of commercials on fast forward, images flash before me. I see my mother crying, Grayson doing Desiree’s hair, Devin crying, Desiree holding hands with a boy. She’s all grown up. I see Devin hugging Grayson. Grayson is older with gray hair. Devin is a man. I can’t hear them or make out what any of it means, and then I see Desiree standing at a podium on a stage and everything slows down. She’s all grown up. Breathtakingly beautiful. She’s a woman. Her hair falls far below her shoulders in big loose curls.
There’s a large crowd of people, an audience, standing down in front of her. They’re all clapping and cheering for her. I smile even though I don’t know why they’re cheering. I must be seeing into the future, or has that much time gone by since I got here? I shake the question out of my mind and give all of my attention to her. The crowd soon goes quiet and she adjusts the microphone. I see her rustle a few papers around in front of her and then she begins to speak.
“Thank you so much, everyone, for such an incredibly warm welcome.”
She smiles and it radiates. What an amazing woman she has become. Tears fill my eyes and she continues.
“I want to welcome all of you to this year’s Suicide Awareness and Prevention fundraiser.”
I instantly freeze, and the words she just spoke echo inside my head like a wrecking ball. Suicide Awareness and Prevention. She clears her throat some, and I feel a lump start to form in mine.
“My name is Desiree Cunnigham, and I lost my mother, Riah Winter, to suicide when I was only seven years old.”
Her voice goes from clear and confident to shaky. She quickly straightens her shoulders, and I see her make eye contact with someone in the front row. It’s Grayson. He nods his head and she smiles.
“I’m here today because suicide took my mother away and it changed my life forever. I’m here because I think raising awareness and shining a light on this issue is imperative for the future of our world. You all know the statistics. I’m not here to regurgitate the same old things you already know. There are some of you right now, standing in this crowd, who suffer from a mental illness, or you have a loved one who does, or like me, you have lost someone dear to you at the hands of it.”
She pauses and opens what looks to be a book. I continue to hang on her every word.
“In college it was my mission to learn more about mental health and what drives human beings to the brink of madness, where they feel the only option left is death. I began writing about how suicide affects those left behind. While we are memorializing our lost loved ones, what happens to the ones left behind? Sometimes I would refer to myself as one of the forgotten ones. We’re the side effect to suicide, I guess you could say. I started keeping a diary when I was about twelve years old. So, when I decided to start writing an account of how it has been dealing with the loss of my mother, I referred back to that diary often. I’m proud to say that this year my story was picked up by a major publisher and will be releasing this month. A portion of the sales from
Left Behind
will go to this foundation to help support further awareness and prevention programs. I’m here today to read an excerpt from the book for you. I hope you can find some solace in my words.”