The bathroom was nothing special, but it felt like a relief to me. I had never been so happy to see a toilet in my life. Dropping to my knees, I heaved into the porcelain bowl. The taste of my retching was like death. I staggered to the sink and cleared away the bile from my tongue. Straightening up, I became fiercely aware of the face in the mirror. The man I saw staring back at me was a stranger.

He had more prominent features and weathered skin. Dark circles sagged from beneath his eyes, and a large, bluntly cut mass hair framed both his head and jaw. However, the most unnerving feature sat squarely in the center–the deadened, bloodshot eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had seen more than they were ever meant to.

I turned my head from side to side and studied my face in the mirror. The years had not been kind to me. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The conditions in the house were often unforgiving, especially in the summers and winters when I went without proper insulation, heating, or cooling. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had had a good night’s sleep. What did it feel like to wake up well rested?

Images started flashing through my mind. I remembered bracing myself against the wall to tear out all the mirrors from the walls. Shards of glass cut my hands and mixed in with the wreckage as they shattered against the floor. Clumsily, I tossed what was left of them out of the nearest second story window. I didn’t watch them fall. No, I just closed the blinds and never opened them again.

Blocking my view and refusing to look back… That was a reoccurring theme in my life, probably a much more pervasive theme than I had ever admitted to myself before. Maybe I thought that if I couldn’t see my reflection anymore, I wouldn’t ever have to face myself again. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul… if only it were that simple.

It would never be good enough just to avert my gaze. The world had moved on without me, whether or not I refused to see it. I had become a man while I still thought of myself as just a boy, and with every day that passed, I became less myself. Staring transfixed at this face that looked far too old for thirty-four, I cursed myself under my breath.

And the longer I looked, the more alien the face became. Slowly, my features melted away and disappeared entirely. The featureless nature of the face bled down into the neck and shoulders. Before I knew it, I was left staring at the faceless giant that haunted my dreams as both a friend and an enemy.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I flinched.

The faceless giant then spoke the first words I had ever heard it utter.

“You are asking me something you already know,” it stated flatly. There was neither affection nor contempt in its tone. “I am who I have always been, and I am here because this is the only place I could ever be. The two of us are intertwined.”

That explanation, which gave me more questions than answers, did nothing to put me at ease. In exasperation, I rubbed my temple with my hand. When was the last time I felt this way? It felt like a long time ago. Was it at my father’s funeral?

The clear, bright blue sky felt out of place that day with the somber atmosphere of the crowd. My father’s casket was slowly being lowered into the ground. Somebody was patting my shoulder. I think they told me that everything would be fine, but I couldn’t see how anything would ever be fine again. To the other side, my mother was silently weeping into her hands.

That day, I lost both my parents. My mother was never the same again. Her formerly upbeat demeanor morphed into that of someone I didn’t know. I’d come home from school and see her hunched over, once again, on the couch, sorting through yet another box of treasures. At least, that was what she called them. I didn’t agree. Many of them were old and worn, and some of them were even broken.

I wanted to talk to her about how everything was changing and how alone I felt, but it never felt like the right time. There was always too much–too much for her and too much for me. She was too fragile, and I was too young. And while I was paralyzed by indecision, her hoard continued to grow. The house gradually transformed from a home into a warehouse.

The day that the bombs fell, I was at home with my mother. She was in a panic, flying from one corner of the house to another, trying to choose what to take down to the basement with us. Of course, it was a moot point; the basement was so full of food and supplies that there was no room for anything else. There was barely even enough room for the two of us to shelter together.

I swore under my breath, hoping she would just let it go, but every one of those odds and ends was important to her in some special and disorganized way. Whether it was a gold chain or a lamp without a shade, she couldn’t choose. There wasn’t anything she could bear to leave behind. Overhead, I heard the sound of engines, and I called out to her.

The bomber planes were getting closer and closer. When the first bomb fell, the ground shook beneath us. Her walls of clutter crashed to the ground, and I screamed at her. We couldn’t wait anymore. It was now or never.

All of my pent-up frustration bubbled up and out of me. Why did she care more about piles of trash than our lives? What good was all this junk to us if we both ended up dead?! What was the point of risking our lives when it was impossible to save everything that she cared about anyway? Why couldn’t she just let it go?! As my chest heaved from the weight of my catharsis, I waited for her to answer me, but all she could offer me were halfhearted words.

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“Oh, Victor. You know I can’t handle you when you get like this,” she sighed, without even looking up at me.

That was the final straw. I wasn’t going to risk my life for someone who cared so little for either of us. She could throw away her life, but I wasn’t going down with her. Turning away, I stalked down to the basement and slammed the door behind me. Part of me wanted her to get what she deserved, but another part of me didn’t really think she would be that careless. I thought she would come to her senses before the bombs hit our house, but she didn’t.

She was in her second-story bedroom when it exploded into shards of metal and wood. The only room in the house she shouldn’t have been in was precisely where she was. I screamed for help, but when it came, she was already unconscious and bleeding out. I wanted a second chance to do the right thing, but she never opened her eyes again. She died quietly in a hospital room with only me by her side.

Guilt was eating away at me… Her blood was on my hands. I shouldn’t have let her putter away when I knew how dangerous it was for us. I shouldn’t have screamed at her when it might have been the last words she would ever hear. I shouldn’t have hated her for something that she couldn’t control; I knew that she was sick, and I still resented her for it.

I became an orphan at the age of seventeen. It was too much. Everything was too much. I broke. I ran. In my pain, I sought familiarity. I came back to the only place that was ever mine. It was the house where we were once a family, the house where everything was fine, and the only place where I had always felt safe.

Maybe I thought that if I stayed there long enough, one day I would wake up and everything would be the way it was meant to be. Maybe I was punishing myself for killing her. Maybe I just hated the world and wanted to retreat from it. I don’t know. I might never know. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

Between the way my mother was at the end and the way she was when I had seen her in the grocery store, not much had changed. It was true, the hallucination’s skin had blanched, and its eyes had faded, but my mother had already been living as a ghost for years. I remembered how, in my vision, she had leaked water all over the floor before ultimately disappearing into it. It occurred to me that the pool might not have been made of water. What if, instead of water, it was made of her tears? After all, she was a woman who lived in fear, and she drowned in her past, unable to see a tomorrow.

The person who had stolen my mother from me was not myself; it was her. She was the only one who could have made the decision to live. If I had dragged her kicking and screaming down to the basement, who knows if she would have ever forgiven me? There was a cruel irony to it, she had spent considerable amounts of time and money preparing for the worst, and when the worst came, she was not there to see it.

“You knew,” I scowled.

“I did,” it answered.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have done something else with my life! I could have chosen better!” I growled.

“Do you mean like how you told your mother? Did she listen to you then in her last hours?” it replied.

I blinked. “What?”

“You already knew,” it continued. “If I had told you something you didn’t want to hear, you would have just ignored me. The house and the streets told you as much. The spot where she laid in her final moments is still stained with blood. You had more than enough evidence to tell you the truth, and instead of facing it, you averted your eyes. You knew she would never come back to you.”

My knuckles turned white with my grip on the side of the sink. The events of the night before haunted me. There was the room that had called me, the door I couldn’t ignore, and the spot where I slept on the floor. It was both stained and bare... like it had been shielded by something… Then, it hit me; it was the very place where she had fallen. I had slept in the very same spot she was when she had taken the blunt of the blast, the one that had blown that gaping hole in the roof. Tears burned my eyes.

“Was any of it real?” I whispered, dropping my head, and bracing myself against the sink. “Did any of it matter?”

“Some of it was real,” it answered. “And how much of it has meaning will be up to you, both now and in the future.”

I raised my head slightly then.

“What about the handlebar? Was that real?” I asked.

“It was real in that it gave meaning and form to your desperate longing for your past and your youth,” it considered. “Will that be enough for you?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered.

“You will have time to come to terms with all of this. Perhaps you will know when the time is right,” it offered.

“What if I’m not worth it?” I breathed. “What if I’m weak, useless, and pathetic?”

“To be human is to be all of these things that you speak of, and in the end, you are the only one that can answer these questions that you seek.”

“But how do you know?” I asked.

“I don’t; I only have faith. I have faith that we will forge a path to the future together, for we are one and the same. I am you, and you are me. I will always be a part of you, and I can’t escape you any more than you can escape me. We will go everywhere together, and there will be nowhere for us to run or hide from each other.”

I paused then and considered what it had just told me. Gradually, the pieces began to click together, and I knew then what he was. He was a part of my psyche. Perhaps those water-logged arms he carried around were full of my unshed tears, and the reason why I had always seen those eyes that he never had was that they were my eyes. The tears that had been burning my eyes broke free then, and I wept more than I had ever wept before. I wept enough for the last seventeen years in which I had held it all in.

“We were never meant to be apart this long; we were meant to be one, not two.”

I knew he was right. He was all the pieces of me that I had disowned a long time ago. He was all the parts of me that knew the truth I couldn’t bear to see. He was an adult, and I was the child, but I was no longer a boy. Instead, I was a man.

“Now that you know what I am, will you take me back?” the giant asked.

“I don’t have a choice,” I answered.

“No, Victor, you always have a choice,” it replied.

The truth in its words struck me. I looked up and stared at my reflection, illuminated with a new flame. This time, absolutely, I would not falter. I would not look back, and I would move on into the future.

“Welcome home,” I whispered barely audibly.

Then we merged back together and became one once more. My face in the mirror finally became my own, and I recognized the man that I saw within it. I was the man in the mirror.