Tuesday, Feb. 01, 2005 - 8:33 p.m.
The young boy opens the door of his mother's wardrobe, and looks into the full length mirror. He examines his reflection, and then does what each one of us has done before - he turns away quickly, looking for some delay in his reflection. Of course, the reflection turned away just as fast and he could not detect any violation of reality. The young boy learned two things that day: he is not superior to his reflection, and that he cannot move faster than light.
She finally decides, and takes the bottle of pills out from the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror. As she swings the mirror shut, she is confronted by the sudden arrival of her own face. She empties the bottle into her hand and tilts her head back to the swallow the pills. From the corner of her eye, it looks as if her reflection is fractionally faster. She will remember things this way, if only to delegate the responsibility for her own suicide to the other girl inside the mirror.
The door to the fitting room closes and the old lady is dizzy for a moment - the mirrored door and wall have reflected each other to infinity. The old lady looks into the wall mirror, at each iteration of reflected light, and remembers the ray diagrams that she had to draw in secondary school depicting this exact scenario. The infinite number of reflections move with her as she undresses, and she thinks of each image existing as another iteration of herself, in one of the infinite fitting rooms in the universe. They lead and have led so many possible lives - one version of her lived without grandchildren, another married a different man. But then she remembers that in the ray diagrams, the reflected images are virtual and constructed with the dotted lines of false light, of what the eye imagines. She sighs, and after trying on the blouse, leaves the fitting room in a state of slight disappointment. She had been unable to escape, even from the small confines of the fitting room's walls.
