A Reflection Broken

It was warm, and yet hands rubbed her arms to fight the chill she felt. It was bright, yet she could barely see further than ten feet. She knew exactly where she was, yet she was lost. Her identity was as clear to her as it had been her whole life, yet she did not know who she was. Stepping forward, she ignored that each step sounded differently, and yet held onto that strange occurance, as first she stepped on glass not there, her heavy boot crushing snow on the next, her sandled foot brushing past great flowers, yellow and blue and purple, green, red and violet, whites and blacks, their stems lush and green. Each time her foot planted itself firmly on the ground, her sense of smell changed, the smell of boots, a wet blizzard, a large field covered in spring-time growth.

Her shirt, first too tight, then too big, purple silk, then white linen, brown wool, then rough dark blue leather. Constricting, then perfect for movement, the feeling of being smashed against herself, then having no support, then being held firmly in place was distracting in ways clothing never seemed to be. Her stomach felt flat and small, looked large and ovoid, swirling and about to pop, then shrank, all was distorted at the edge of her vision and looking anywhere at herself seemed to make the changes stop, to provide a constant form. Her shape and form was continuously distorted, her awareness stripped and sown back in, as if a seamstress was constantly making the same mistakes as before, no matter how much the mistake was removed and corrected, it would always be there, that awareness, yet it seemed to change focus constantly.

Finally she stopped, then stared as she kept walking, then stopped and stopped again. Watching herself in a broken bit of glass, she tried to look at herself. She feel off. Lighter in the chest, heavier in the shoulders. She felt...odd. Brows coming down, he looked into the piece of glass, and wondered who he really was, why he felt different, as if his consciousness had been broken. Looking at a piece of glass next to the first, he sighed. Something caught his attention and she turned her head to the side. No. That couldn't....Could it? Surely not. That just wasn't it. Bending over, feeling her thighs reform as...other changes occurred, she pushed the second piece of glass to the first, then stood straight and looked at both at once. A searing sensation went through him. She had no idea what she was seeing but he knew it was part of the reason. Part of the broken, yet whole reality of her life. She needed to understand what had happened to him. And to do that, looking at both pieces of the glass seemed to help. In one piece, he looked back out calmly with a growing sense of concern and alarm. In the other piece, she looked back out worriedly.

The Reality of a broken self was truly...tumultuous.