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Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Mirror Universe


That's a picture I took on this day five years ago. I was living at the time in Fort Worth, Texas. It might explain why the trees have so many leaves this close to winter. In Texas, the first really cold night usually happens around Halloween, but if that doesn't happen, it'll get really cold over Thanksgiving. It might warm up again in early December, but the cold weather in November will fool you every year into thinking winter has begun.

My mother left my father when I was four. He was a drunk. My mother started dating someone when I was around eight. That person was also a drunk, but my mother didn't move in with him & kept him at arm's length. My mother was a deeply superstitious person. Which is why it was so weird when he gifted her this decorative I guess you'd call it picture which was a canvas with pieces of a broken mirror on it, arranged artistically but not reassembling the mirror.

It's not something I talked to my mother about. If she has seen me break a mirror, she would've screamed as though I had swallowed a bomb. Perhaps she thought the bad luck caused by breaking so many mirrors (he had several in his apartment) resided solely in him. & he truly was someone who had had many, many misfortunes in his life.

As for the bad luck caused by broken mirrors, how did it work? Don't ask me - I don't know the mechanics of superstition. Like, does breaking the mirror alert demons? My mother thought such questions impudent. She didn't have to explain, she just knew it was true.

The mirror above wasn't broken, someone just put tape on it as though it had been broken. Fooling the demons, I suppose. But maybe it brought bad luck anyway - someone left it on their lawn. To be given away.

Or maybe it's not a mirror after all? I hadn't really looked at the picture. I don't remember the circumstances of taking the picture - it was obviously on a dogwalk but that's all I can say for certain. Maybe it wasn't artistic, the placement of the tape. After all it looks like it has a kind of vent - what mirror has a vent?

Honestly I should pay more attention. I was focused, then as now, on the reflection of the tree.

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