Seeing Alice in the Mirrors

The following years were very complicated for my family.

My mother moved to Amsterdam, the little town full of canals and bridges in Holland, and had a little girl called Branca with her new husband Jan.

Pearl moved into our house, and had a little girl called Eva with my father.

My brother Marco was twenty and moved into my grandmother Matilde’s apartment, which was just around the corner in front of the big prep school. He didn’t speak to any of my parents for months.

My brother Levi and I were too young to leave my father’s place, and so the two of us became more attached to each other than ever before, and secretly hated my parents and Pearl, not to mention Jan.

We didn’t consider Eva our sister, and we never wanted to spend Christmas with my mother in Holland. If I had always been a little miss weird, by this time I became a pissed off little miss weird.

Levi eventually found himself a girlfriend called Fausta, who looked like a fairy with extremely long hair, and I started seeing some other girl behind the mirrors and in my dreams.

This girl looked just like me, after all she was my reflection, but I knew she wasn’t me.

I would look in the mirror and see someone else, some sad but smiley girl, who smiled with her lips but had the saddest eyes, and I knew I was doing exactly the opposite. I hadn’t smiled for a long time but my eyes were somehow still happy.

I would dream of myself when I slept at night and this girl would be in my dreams instead of me, wearing other clothes, other hairstyles, speaking differently, being me.

I would find pictures of myself in those dreams, but I wouldn’t remember the moments they portrayed. Those moments never existed. I had never looked like that, I had never lived that life, and I didn’t know that girl.

Once I dreamed I was older and lying on a bed that wasn’t mine, in a room I thought was at my grandmother Matilde’s apartment, and I looked sad and bored.

I got up to go outside. The day was yellow and humid, and the streets were covered with hundreds of autumn leaves that had fallen from the trees.

I had no jacket on, was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt that were not mine, and a fringe.

I walked all the way to Rock's street, hoping to see him. Then, when I got there, he came out of his building.

He was sixteen again, instead of twenty-four, and looked like a god. His blond hair was gently blowing in the wind as he walked towards me.

I smiled at him, he smiled back, and he obviously knew me although I was about his age. When we crossed each other we both said a simple Hello, and we kept on walking.

He didn’t grab me and kiss me like a younger sister as he used to, and I didn’t hug him and tell him I loved him like I always did. It was as if we hardly knew each other.

I woke up feeling such a profound sadness that I had to cry, and I knew I hadn’t been me in that dream.

I knew I had been that other girl I saw behind the mirrors. That girl who smiled constantly but was so sad, that girl who wouldn’t leave me alone. What did she want?

Sometimes I was scared. I was scared of becoming crazy. I wouldn’t dare telling anyone about the girl behind the mirrors, not even my brother Levi. But I decided to give her a name, and her name was Alice.

Then, when I was thirteen, Rock died.

He was found by his parents in the bathroom, unconscious, with a needle and syringe still hanging from his arm.

His sister called our house and I got the phone in the hall. She was crying and asked to speak to my father or to my brother Marco.

I guess I knew immediately that something was wrong with Rock, so I started shouting at her to tell me what happened, and Stella, the maid, came running from the kitchen looking very scared.

Stella grabbed the phone from my hands, and I kept on shouting something about me being the one who loved him more.

Pearl came from the living room also looking very astonished, and started asking me what was going on.

‘Rock died’ I replied, when I saw Stella hanging up the phone and wiping sudden tears from her eyes. And then I fainted right in the middle of the two of them.

I woke up on my bed, and I didn’t know what was going on for a few seconds.

I laughed because I realized that I had fainted or something like that, I thought I had been unconscious for a long time, and then I remembered what happened.

I realized that I had just been brought to the room because Stella was still drawing curtains closed and taking off my shoes.

Pearl was holding my hand and telling me that everything was okay, and Stella was saying she was going to prepare some chamomile tea for me and that everything was all right.

And then I felt guilty for not having been with Rock more often, for not having stopped him from dying, for not having told him lately how much I still loved him.

I didn’t return to earth for months, and my father wanted me to see a psychiatrist. But I wouldn’t. I started writing poems all over the walls in my room, in my diaries, on my arms and legs, and on my bed sheets.

I started dressing in black, bought a pair of army boots, and stopped combing my hair. That was all I could do to deal with how I was feeling.

My daydreaming came back in force for days on end, lying on my bed, staring at the walls and listening to Pink Floyd.

Again I was elaborating in detail a whole new life, just like I used to do when I was a child, and in this life I was eight years older than I really was.

That would have been enough to be Rock’s girlfriend, and to have saved his life.

Like that I could have been friends with all my brother Marco’s friends, since his girlfriend Sara herself was only eight years older than me.

We could have been best friends, Sara and I.

And when my parents got divorced I would have been eighteen instead of ten, and everything would have been much easier to handle, and I could have moved into my granny Matilde’s apartment as well.

At school I kept on having no friends. Not that I was unpopular or anything. In fact, there had always been a keen curiosity about me, since I was so reserved and mysterious.

Sara, my brother’s girlfriend, would visit me sometimes, and although I didn’t really understand what interest she had in me, I enjoyed these visits very much.

Sara made me feel peaceful and special.

She would brush my hair and ask me questions while doing it. She was very patient and friendly, and liked to take me for walks in our neighborhood, or to have ice-cream at the trendy cafe where all the intellectuals met.

I would then be seen by my colleagues from school walking around with a much older Sara, and talking to all these avant-garde people and therefore be respected and left alone.

My colleagues accepted me as being different and reserved. In fact, weird.