Forgoten things

Years passed. Rooms grew, the baby grew, things changed... but nothing changed in that girl's room. Still the same bed, the same silence, and the same mirror.

But the inside of the mirror was now completely different.

Sounds began to multiply. At first, she was talking to just one person, then another came. Then another. They were all different. One always asked questions, one just smiled, one didn't speak but made her presence felt. As the days went by, there were more and more of them. They grew in number.

The girl was no longer alone... but she had never been so tired.

As soon as she woke up in the morning, they would start talking. They were with her even when she went to school. The words on the blackboard looked blurry. The voices of the children in the classroom turned into a muffled hum. But the voices inside her were clear. They were sharp. Bright and close. She could hear them, she could answer them.

When a teacher asked a question, she would forget the answer. She had to raise her hand, but which one was real, who was that teacher, what had been said just a moment ago? Everything slipped from her mind.

“What was the lesson?”

“What did I wear today?”

“Who touched me just now?”

The girl could no longer remember.

Because the real world was hidden behind a veil of fog. Some days, even when walking down the street, her eyes would focus on something else. She would bump into people coming from the opposite direction, walking without knowing where she was going. While everyone else in the classroom looked out the window, she would look inward deep inside herself.

Once, she tried to write something in her notebook. She held the pen and began scribbling under the heading. But she stopped in the middle of the line. She didn't understand what she had written. The letters were unfamiliar. The words seemed nonexistent. She looked at the paper and thought:

“When did I write this?”

Time was slipping away. Her memory was like a sieve now. Facts, experiences, words spoken... everything was turning into shadows. She only remembered the voices in the mirror. What they said. How they made her feel.

One night, her mother opened the door. She looked inside quietly. The girl was sitting on the floor, whispering to the mirror.

“I won’t leave you… because you never left me.”

Her mother said nothing. Perhaps she paused for a moment, but then she closed the door. Because in this house, what she said no longer mattered to anyone.

And the girl was fading away a little more each day. The sparkle in her eyes was giving way to a heavy darkness like a fog settling in. She seemed to be no longer of this world.