The Mirror

It wasn't given in bad faith; and it wasn't taken in bad faith. But something changed, something passed between them in that one moment. She forgot to smile and he saw something, slumped, and covered his face with ashes.



You thought I wanted to...what, exactly?



His heart became heavy, was close to the ground. Fire to stone. Why does hardness always defeat softness?

...The mirror shattered. It fell to the ground and from its thousand pieces many streams flowed-or were they tears? And to this very day men and women drink from it with sorrow and clouded thoughts, each suspicious of the other. How to pick up the pieces?



The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in memory after separation.



I must go from here, she said. For there's no place for the way I feel. But I will always be beyond the blue horizon, there or thereabouts. And you, clown, will you be sad?


How strange, he thought to himself. What else can a clown be? Snow fell. It was general all over. And so he fell, and fell, and fell. And for a while it seemed that there would be no end to his falling. Until he reached earth. His hand reached out: snow and skies remembered. Snow still dreaming of floating upwards. Slightly bewildered, out of sorts, his first questions: what's the time, where are you (and to this day people still question time, still ask: where are you?) .


But there was no-one there. Am I the only one awake or am I the only one asleep? Here, what is dream, what is reality? What is day, what is night? Is it winter now? Why else this black sun?

He trudged on, leaving no footprints, or none that any would follow. What else is there to do but kill time. He took off his blue raincoat and sang, thinking of that time before time:

but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

And then he just happened to come across a blank piece of paper, as one might stumble into a rose garden. He looked at it intently. A blank piece of paper is full of ways. Much better than a mirror !, he thought to himself. He knew that she had sent it, to paper over the cracks, to soften the stone -softness always defeats hardness; and he would write, and send word back to her...