Guilt Trip

There’s an annual gameshow where I’m from: temporary monarchs, where the winners get to rule our nation for one year. Once their time is up, they can sign up to play and try winning again.

Dear mirror and reflection, why am I telling you this? You live here, I’m sure you know how it works. You’ve lived here forever, and you will remain here forever. My family, and therefore previous versions of yourself have lived here for generations, and we will stay here for many more to come. 

Most people would pour out their thoughts into a diary, but I say them out loud, as if I were making a wish. I face my other self, you, in the dark, and tear my heart of paper in half.

 I can make my other emotions come out whenever I want. I’m sung to sleep by my fears, which morph into the porcelain doll I had when I was younger and buried in our back garden, terrified that it would come to life at night to kill me. I keep my happiness boxed away underneath my bed, I come across it every once in a while, whenever I’m giving my room a deep clean. Sadness is stored in the photos on my windowsill and within the soil of my dying sunflowers, while my anger is my lucky charm: I wear it day and night.  

But guilt? It will always be yours; it will always be you. We will stare at each other in the darkness whenever I feel like tearing out the stitches in my chronic wounds, and you will transform. 

You will turn into the child we once were, lips covered in chocolate and crying . Our mother had just screamed at us for eating cake, and from that moment, anything sweet was banned from her house. It was for our own good, desserts have too many calories, and if she hadn’t stopped us, we would have become a whale by the age of ten.

‘You already act like a pig; do you want to look like one too?’ you write her words out onto the mirror before changing again.

And then we are ten years older.  I know what you are showing me before you have the chance to play it out. A sixteen-year-old girl crying after she rejected her best friend, the boy she had basically grown up with. Had their entire friendship been a lie? A way to get closer to her, to get what he really wanted? And while his anger at her response had stretched her stomach into a tightrope, what hurt the most was everyone else’s reaction. 

‘You should be ashamed.’

‘You should give him a chance.’

‘You should be thankful he even looked in your direction. Who else will ever want you?’

So I call him. I cry, say that I’m sorry, ask him if he’ll ever forgive me. He says yes, and then we are together, until I can no longer pretend. He screams at me once again that I shouldn’t have led him on.

And those people, the ones who told me to be ashamed, shamed me again. The ones who told me to give him a chance said that I shouldn’t have broken his heart. The ones who told me to be thankful said that this was the reason why no one would ever love me again.

You’re a kaleidoscope of memories.  We’re twenty-two and our grandmother just passed away. She was old, she was sick, we hadn’t spoken in years. We never had a good relationship anyway, and yet her death weighs me down.

It was my fault.

I should have visited her.

I should have tried to mend our relationship. 

And then you’re me three days ago. Hand bleeding with pieces of glass embedded between each knuckle. I couldn’t take it anymore, you’d show me even when I didn’t want to, I tried covering up the mirror with something, but I’d always find the cover gone by morning. One time, I even saw you taking it off yourself. 

‘How could you do this to me?’ you say. ‘To us?’

Guilt flooded every part of my life. Slipped through cracks, weaved herself inside my other emotions. Seeing you, myself, act out my worst memories as if you were in a school play, knowing that no matter how much I screamed at myself to not do it, it wouldn’t change the outcome may have hurt, but at least I didn’t have to feel them for one brief moment. Maybe that was what had kept me from snapping, until recently at least.  

But what’s worse? Lying awake, feeling everything, and letting the guilt eat you alive, or not feel something for a brief moment but have to sit through it like a powerless spectator knowing what’s going to happen?

Luckily for me, I don’t have to choose. I live through both. 

I stare and stare, until every moment has been played a thousand times, until you’re back to being me, sitting on the floor of your childhood bedroom, until the guilt trickles back into me.