Divergent Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
He looked into the mirror and wondered who he was really looking
at. He was important. He was
important. He was important. He was important. He repeated it over and over
in his mind, testing it, figuring out if it felt right. He had no idea if he
was important or not. The man in the mirror appeared important, but he didn’t
really know if he was or not. He looked to the mirror, looking for answers,
looking for directions. The mirror would tell him what to do.
He was a man if intelligence. He was a man of ideas. He was a man
of importance.
He looked into the mirror and straightened his tie. A tie had to
be nice and tight and look proper. A tie conveyed much about the man. He hadn’t
thought about that before, but the man in the mirror had a tie and the man in the
mirror looked serious, so he tried to live up to the expectation.
He had information. Details. Ideas. He saw the imagined as if it
were real. He saw the discoveries that seemed like magic. He saw the inventions
that could conquer the impossible.
They said he had one million ideas. Who knows if that was actually
true? It was more like he thought of a way to sell the idea that he had one
million ideas. It was a confidence game of sorts. He had the best idea of all –
acting like he had ideas. People bought into that. People believed that. One
idea was all he needed. He just had to sell it.
The man in the mirror could sell it. He looked like he could sell
anything. That was the true confidence game, right there. Look in the mirror
and believe in what you saw – believe that the man looking back had the answer
and really could sell it.
He believed. He believed and he was going to sell it. He knew he
could. He had convinced himself he could.
The secret thing about the man in the mirror though, was that he
really wasn’t the man, he was just one way of looking at things. He was a
reflection. The man in the mirror was a concept. An icon. But the man was much
more complex than that. The man in the mirror was a projection of the singular
version. The man in the mirror could be anything. But it was just one angle. It
was never the whole.
He was worried the whole was never going to quite add up to being
the reflection. He was afraid that what looked back was the better man and he
was just the pale comparison.
Who was he? Who was he really? Was he the man in the mirror? There
had been so many of them. How did he know which was which and which was the
real version? The mirror showed so many versions. Better versions. Better
lives. Powerful men. Wealthy men. Heroic men. All he was was a voyeur, looking
in, hoping for something better, and hoping some of it would rub off. The
mirror didn’t tell him how to make that trick real.
Alone, he looked at himself in the mirror and he wanted to
believe. He wanted to be that something special, that something better. He
wanted the better self, the better life. He wanted the mirror to be true.
It had snowed. The weather was freezing the night before and the
snow had begun early and carried on through the night.
He was nameless and homeless. He had frozen to death sometime
during the night. Who was he? Who had he been? There was no indication. Somehow
life had led him here. Who knows what he could have been in another life, if
one thing had turned out a different way. Life could have been better. Perhaps
it should have been better.
He had been found still clinging to a broken handheld mirror. He
had no other possessions of any significance. But he clung to that mirror.
Clearly, it must have been important.
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