FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

Part One

With my eyes I go through the four cardinal points that surround me in this cubicle where I have lived for days, or years, or centuries, according to what the clock of my semi consciousness tells me.

I’m depressed, and the world around me is this miserable room with no light, from where I try to look through a gap of a closed window with the hope of glimpsing a flowery garden covered by the sun with butterflies moving here and there having a serene blue sky retouched by a few clouds of cotton as a background.

What I see, instead, is a filthy, dead-end alley with no way out, full of debris, with the bitter face of winter rising gloomy, and dead insects floating in puddles, making the landscape as daunting as my life.
The world stinks and the bad smell penetrates through the crack of the window as a poisonous gas that invades my nostrils.

I can’t find anyone to answer or satisfy my questions. I scream, and my clamor is lost in the echo of this empty and secluded place like the lament of a moribund inside a dungeon.

There’s a man in the parlor in the next room separated from the room where I am by a glass so thick that I cannot hear his voice or any sound. I have a feeling that I know him because his face is not strange to me but my torpor keeps me from connecting ideas.

He looks at me straight in the eyes and apparently says everything I say, imitates my gestures and, incredible as it may seem, also keeps in the face the same discouraged expression of those who have not slept for two weeks, like me. At least this is what it seems to me, since my notion of time is damaged by my derangement.

I’m not sure where I am or what I’m doing here, and exhaustion blunts my reasoning.

I must be dreaming, otherwise I would had found an explanation for this unusual and unsustainable situation – but I punch the metal door and my hand hurts, which confirms that I’m wide awake.
I have never been a brilliant person, capable of great discoveries or conclusions, but even an animal that acts only by instinct would have a reasonable notion of where he is. A rat, a cockroach, an insect, whatever, has the instinct of survival that helps him catch a glimpse of the size of the trouble he has gotten himself into. 

But unfortunately, I feel useless and aimless.

It seems that I’m in a cell and the only piece of furniture that fills this void is this hard white enameled metal chair where I take turns sitting and standing up, which leads me to think that I’m in a hospital or in the anteroom of an asylum, being psychologically tormented to confess some offense that I do not remember doing.