Well, here I am.

My eyes are tired from reading in the glow of my laptop's shining screen. The eye fatigue is always worse in the dark. Contrast, y’know.

Hmmmm. It's midnight.
The cursor is blinking; heregoneheregoneheregone heregone, here, gone, here...slower each second. Curses on this blank space. Hey, at least I have...let's see...fifty-three words? Well, now its fifty-six. Seventy-two if you count the words I'm just now writing.

Whatever. At least I'm filling up space.


You see, I just have to write something. I mean, after what happened to me, how could I not? Writing my story…oh, that would be easy. That's what I thought at first. Its turning out more difficult than I imagined.

Ergh...where to begin?
This just isn't working. Did I tell you how terrible I am at writing?

...and yet, in life, I wanted to be an author. Likely.

So I'm dead (I guess).

So I'm writing (kind of).

I should probably tell you how I got to be…dead (ish)?
Well, whatever I am now, it sure wasn't my choice. Heck, I would probably be alive and ordinary if it weren't for Susie.
Susie.

I suppose it wasn't her fault, really, either.
(OK, now I promise I'll just tell my story with no distracted comments from my hyperactive ADD side. Though, I'm dead…so I really don't know if I still have ADD. Seems like it. Anyways...)

We were just sisters, living here in the mirror image of this very house, with Facebooks and math books, Cheerios for breakfast and grilled cheese for lunch (man, do I miss food!) We fought about stuff, like my lacy purple tank top that she ripped with her chunky rhinestone ring, and whose legs were fatter (hers, definitely. I swear she always ate all the homemade gingersnaps my mom made).
But we loved each other, I think, and we loved our house and our mom, and Triscuit, our adorable Labrador with the floppy ears, and…our life.
Our life...

I’d always hated mirrors. Not just because I'm ugly, (now I can't see myself in them anymore, thank the Lord), but because of the memories. Memories of shadows and lights, and things that didn't quite match up on both sides, and backwards things, and those hands that I swear I saw when my blurry eyes first opened every morning.

I'm shuddering right now, thinking of them. Even though, on this side of the mirrors, I've found that I can't feel heat or warmth. Its weird, trust me.
OK…
Susie loved mirrors. She thought she was really pretty (well, she actually was, the idiot) and she was always making those scrunched-up model faces with poufy lips and her eyes opened all big to show off her twenty-mile-long eyelashes. I think she couldn't see the evil in mirrors, the scary twistedness, because all she looked at was herself. And since I hated seeing me, I looked at the other things.
Which is why I'm dead.

The day I died was a Saturday, I'm pretty sure, because I had slept in really late and messed around the computer (this very one… well, kind of this one: the none-demented version, anyways) all day. Susie and Mom were going to see some play at our high school, and I wasn't feeling well (too many bowls of Cheerios-and-Cap'n-Crunch-with-2%-milk. I’ve always been slightly lactose intolerant)… so I stayed home.

Oh geez, was that the stupidest mistake ever. Of my life.
I walked in the bathroom to empty my bladder, a couple minutes after they left, and all these little mini versions of me were sitting on the counter, gazing back up at me with an expression of disgust and rolling their eyes.
Of course. Since Susie had flown out of the house, in a rush, still scrubbing her LashBlast mascara all over those long, luscious eyelashes of hers, she'd forgotten to close all of her stupid makeup compacts in the bathroom. And, worse, she’d left out her little I-need-to-see-the-back-of-my-hair-so-I’m-completely-perfect mirrors. I hated when she did that.

Frustrated, I started closing all of them, snapping their lids hurriedly. My eyes glanced up to the big, green-framed mirror above the sink.
I usually tried to pee fast, avoid looking at that thing. But I looked. And my eyes stayed there.

You know, I really tried to convince myself that I wasn't all alone and I hadn't seen the shower curtain move in that mirror. I tried really hard not to believe that I saw those hands...but if you think about it, not believing yourself really does no good.

Denying reality only delays it.

Yeah.
So, refusing to believe my tricky mind, I grabbed a faded washcloth from the wicker basket on the counter, dampened the frayed edge, and tried to wipe away the smudge that must have been those hands. It had to have been (at least that's what I told myself)

But my hand. My hand... it went through. It flipping went through the mirror.

Okay, so I screamed. If you were me, you would have screamed. Any fifteen-year-old girl would’ve! I mean, hands going through mirrors? Come on!

So I yanked my hand out, and looked at it, assuring myself it was still there. Panicking, I flipped around to the door, hair in my eyes, flipping out. I jiggled the handle, tried to get the heck outta there.
I distinctly remembered that I hadn't locked it, but… it was locked.
Scary stuff.

What can I say? I was completely freaked. So, not even once considering all those superstitious stories, about bad luck and breaking mirrors, I picked up my sister's super-duper heavy volume metal can of Floral Fresh hairspray…and chucked it at that nasty mirror.

The mirror shattered.

My life kind of ended.
But the mirror wasn't gone.

Oh sure, the glass was scattered everywhere and stuff, but do you think a mirror is just made of glass?
Hell no. I found that out.

Long, horrible story short, I was pulled into the mirror. The Other Side. The dark, dusty, twisted, wrong, backwards side, the side you see sometimes, if the lighting is just right.

And I'm still there.


I have to admit, its been almost interesting (…after the initial terror and horrified screams and all the dark, musty hands grabbing at my ankles).
I've learned out to survive.
I've found that all mirrors are connected, and that, hey, I could explore this twisted, evil twin of the world as far I could go. But I'm really not that enchanted by that prospect.

I'm more interested in staying alive.
Well, not alive, I guess. Half-alive? Not possessed by evil spirits? Uneaten by…whatever those things are?
Whatever you want to call it.

So, hope I can talk to you, whoever you are, later…I can't believe I just wrote all this.
Maybe my ADD is gone, after all.

God, I miss Susie. I mean, the human one. Not the one that lives in this side of the mirror...

Well, its now 1:02 in the A.M. Something (I think I know who) is walking around in my backwards bedroom upstairs, and I have a feeling its about to come down. I've got to hide. And then later, I’ll continue my project. Project Try-To-Get-Back-To-Good-Side-Of-Mirror.
Hey, maybe all I have to do is break another mirror…
or would that just make it worse?