The Mirror in the Crowded Room

I’ve finally found you

There is a notebook on the desk.

An old, battered thing—a stranger’s diary—left completely exposed in the middle of this crowded, suffocating room. Curiosity is a disease, a quiet itch, and it gets the better of you anyway. You open it. You read the first line.

Then you forget how to breathe.

Fear—sharp, cold, and violent—grips your throat. Someone is stalking you. Someone has stripped you bare. Because what is this? These are your thoughts. Your private, bleeding secrets. Did you write this? Did you lose your mind and write a diary in another life? No. No. No. Because even if you had, you would have burned it. You would have reduced it to ash and swallowed the smoke before letting anyone see the fragile parts of you. So how is it here?

I saw you yesterday—the owner of that diary.

You were the absolute opposite of what I had imagined. When I first read my own fractured mind trapped between your stolen pages, I thought—I hoped—just for a fraction of a second, that I had found a soulmate. Which I most probably did. You wrote so beautifully about the very things that kill me every single day. The isolation. The suffocating weight of being judged, condemned, and hated before anyone even bothers to speak two words to us. We have both become so tragically, beautifully used to the cruelty of the world.

Except you looked at me and saw the exact same monster. You judged me just like the rest of them. You hated me just like the rest of them.

​But I suppose I asked for that. I suppose I earned every ounce of your hatred with how insensitive, how inconsiderate, and how utterly heartless I forced myself to be. I built the monster that keeps the world away, but I forgot— I forgot it would keep you away, too.

You hate me now. You hate me because you think I am the world. And I hate the world because it’s not you.

you vs the world