A Boy in the Mirror

He found himself in that chamber again. The air hummed with sound, noises of memories disguised as echoes. Voices bled into one another, distant and close at the same time. Screams, shouts and half-formed words looped in the background endlessly. A chorus of things once said, and things never spoken, like rebars trapped in concrete. The light shifted in fragments, never holding still.

A boy sat, curled on the floor with bare feet and his shoulders trembling. His sobs were soft and constant, his breath hitching between them, refusing to stop. It felt like the world itself had collapsed and no one was coming. The sound of his sobs pierced everything like the rain that never stopped, not as grief, but as protest that had never found words.

A man watched from the edge of the room, trying to make sense of the chaos. He looked at the boy whose body was locked in that impossible posture between wanting to run and wanting to be held. The distance between them felt alive, shifting with each breath, like they had met before. It somehow felt sacred, as he wondered if he was intruding or being summoned to witness it.

He tried to move closer, careful not to startle him. “It’s alright,”  he whispered, though the words sounded strange in that place, swallowed before they reached the boy. He tried again, “I’m here.” The child looked at him with his eyes wide, wet, unguarded, and then turned away. The air rippled and the ground beneath them started to crumble like in an earthquake. The walls dissolved, the distance between them stretching as the room faded into a long corridor, lined with doors he half-recognized.

He stepped forward gingerly, half expecting the room to change around him. He called out for the boy. A door opened behind him, loud voices echoing that he did not recognize.

“It’s your fault.”  …

“Why can’t you just remember?”, he heard the voice yelling.

But the door slammed shut as soon as he got closer. Some of the doors were locked but he heard sobs or heavy breathing on the other side. Sometimes there was silence, so heavy that it could crush bone. He found a half-open door where the boy sat weeping, the smell of fear & a reddish hue cast in the flickering light, as an ominous figure stood too close to him.

The floor shifted underfoot like sand as he held his hand out, calling for the boy. The room crumbled around them as the boy ran through another door, caught in a loop of flinching, hiding and surviving as he disappeared into the noise. He ran now, chasing the sound of small footsteps through collapsing rooms and corridors that folded in on themselves and the light flickering between moments that didn’t belong at the same time.

Every turn brought him closer as the boy ran into a dark room at the end of the alley. He panted as he reached for the handle. All the chaos faded behind him as he entered and the air hung a feeling that felt like home. The man called out once again, but his voice felt like it was swallowed by the room. He tried again, softer this time, the boy’s name he didn’t know slipped out like instinct.

The child turned and looked up at him as recognition dawned in his eyes. The kind of eyes that had learnt too early that safety was temporary. He knelt close, enough to see the tear tracks glistening on the boy’s cheeks. The child’s lips trembled like he wanted to speak but the words collapsed before they could form. When he finally did, the voice wasn’t that of a child. It was older,  worn and oddly familiar. He froze in recognition as though looking through a mirror that had forgotten how to reflect. The sounds around them stopped as the boy stared back at him, eyes full of something ancient and pleading.

He hugged the child and found enough of his voice to whisper “It was never your fault”. The crying stopped as he felt the boy’s little palms on his face. The boy’s face flickered like a reflection in a mirror, the room blurring between a lifetime of moments and memories seen and remembered. For an impossible instant, he couldn’t tell who was who, as he tried to hold on. The room folded in, and he was alone again…

He blinked against the warm sunlight casting long shadows in the room, slowly breathing in the calm. The echoes of last night had grown quiet but there was a weight behind his ribs, dense and wordless, a taste of dust in his mouth. His body ached, as though he’d carried someone through sleep. The sheets were damp, his body drenched in sweat like it had been fighting a fever and his hands still curled as if they remembered holding on and not being able to let go. His breath felt bruised as the scent of that place, that fear, dust and quiet, lingered in recognition. His body remembered what his mind had spent years trying to forget, the tension, the scars,  the stillness and the vastness of it all.

He sat up slowly, waiting for his heartbeat to find a rhythm again, realizing it wasn’t the boy who needed comfort anymore. It was him…