Dear Betty Ann,
I have a mirror. What could go wrong?
Yours,
Reflected Tears
* * *
Dear Reflected Tears,
A lot could go wrong. For instance, if you’ve spent the past century sucking the youth out of others, a mirror is pretty much guaranteed to reveal your true age. Or what if you’re a vampire? Your lack of a reflection would be a “dead” giveaway. A mirror might also compel you to conform to an arbitrary notion of beauty perpetuated by the make-up industry. And did you know that mirrors are sometimes haunted?
They’re not all bad, though. I remember Gary once telling a story where the hero uses a mirror to turn an evil magician’s spell against him. I love when this happens! One time I did this story where kids destroy a spell-casting camera by having it take a picture of itself. Camera, mirrors… What could be scarier than facing your ever-changing body? As you might have guessed, I had a rough couple of years there, which can be pretty well encapsulated by the time I made a painstakingly accurate doll of Gary’s 10-year-old brother:
My point being that everyone has problems. What are yours? Apart from reflecting literal reality, a mirror only does what you want it to. The mirror is really a reflection of you, and it can’t show you something that wasn’t there to begin with. Unless it’s haunted.
Always,
Betty Ann
