The Reflection

I was conceived at a New Year's Eve party. My mother was a 16 year old schoolgirl. My father was a 19 year old university student with blue eyes. I don't remember either of them. My mother was killed in a car crash when I was six months old. She didn't know my father. I am the result of a drunken ten minute fumble amidst bits of toilet roll and pools of various bodily fluids on the floor of the bathroom while a queue formed outside the door. How romantic.
I won't bore you with the tedious details of my childhood. I was raised by my grandmother, a severe cold sort of woman . She never spoke about her daughter and my childish questions were inevitably met with a long hard stare and a stony silence that sometimes lasted hours. As a result the only thing I know about my mother was that she had brown wavy hair.
My grandmother died the day I graduated from college. After the ceremony I scanned the crowd, standing on my tiptoes to try and make her out between all the flapping black robes and the camera flashes of beaming parents. I went home to find the neighbours already there, with a priest and a policeman. There'd been a road accident. My grandmother had been in the car with the next door neighbour's son, he'd been giving her a lift to the ceremony. She was killed instantly. He was badly injured. I saw him years later, pushing himself around a supermarket in a wheelchair and chatting to a small boy who walked alongside him.
I've been married once, to a doctor who treated me when I spent three months in hospital with a broken hip. We had a daughter. She was the reason we got married in the first place. A few years later we had a son, a glue baby if I'm totally honest, which is rarely. We split up after 10 years together, more my fault than his. I won't bore you with the tedious details of that either.
I'm forty-one years old. I live alone in a small house on the outskirts of a village near the city centre. My children chose to go and live with their father a few years after we split up, I see them two or three times a week. I work as a vet, I enjoy it and it keeps me occupied. I take lovers when I feel like it, they never last more than a couple of months. I go to the gym four times a week and I drink too much in the evenings.
My house is full of small African sculptures (even though I've never been there), candles and meaningful black and white prints of waves crashing on shores and deserted forest paths. The floors are wooden and the walls are painted in bright rich colours. I have under floor heating in the bathroom. I come across as the sort of person who does yoga, grows her own vegetables and knows D.I.Y. And in fact that's exactly what I am. Anyone who comes to my house is so taken with its deliberate cosiness, the intended ‘homey' feeling, emanated by the clever placement of a throw here, a thick rug there, a subdued lamp warmly glowing in a corner, that very few notice the almost total lack of photographs scattered around, and even fewer mention it. No snaps of friends or family, no mandatory silver framed christening photo, no school photos of gap-toothed children with too neat hair, nothing. I suppose you could say that I'm emotionally detached. The truth is that I have no desire to surround myself with images of unnaturally posed, grinning people that stare out at me from behind shiny paper with flattened dead eyes.
In my sandstone tiled, cacti adorned bathroom, I look at myself reflected in the mirror and wonder, for the millionth time, how could these hands have done such a thing? How did the mind that hunches behind those steady grey eyes not collapse in on itself when the impact of what had been carried out hit with full force? What sort of person have I been all this time? I've allowed myself to walk around this earth for all these years without having even the slightest notion of the malevolence that pulsed silently beneath my skin. No-one ever defines themselves as ‘a bad person'. Everyone has some excuse for their actions that absolves them from their sins in their own mind. And, if I wanted to, if I looked hard enough, I'd find something too. Even if I did, if I managed to auto convince myself that I acted in the best interests of everyone, that I am a sort of Christ figure, sacrificed and suffering for the sake of others, it still wouldn't be enough. I know now what I truly am. And it isn't the sum of what I've achieved. I am the consequence of that one depraved action which cancelled out any good I might have done before it.
Picking up the syringe filled with enough sedative to put eighteen large dogs to sleep permanently, I look at myself again. Those grey eyes bore into mine, the only ones to really, really see the person underneath that they themselves hide. I stare back into them. We regard each other, the mirror and I. The point of the syringe is pressed into the soft smooth skin of my inner elbow. Just enough to push against the skin but not enough to break it. It strikes me as ironic, or perhaps fitting, that the last face I'll ever see in the selfish egoistic life I've led will be my own.
My only thought is this: Do I possess the courage to see this one thing through?