Reflection.

Imagine standing in front of a mirror, face to face with your own reflection, and thinking, “What a strange thing, that reflection.” Many people are under the illusion that the image on the other side of the mirror functions as some kind of enchanted version of reality, an upside-down world in which left and right seem to interchange, in which your right hand suddenly appears on the left side of your reflection, and your left eye suddenly pierces from the right. But—and here begins the great confusion, the true riddle that tests the human mind—who is to say that the image inside, trapped in that thin layer of glass and silver, is not the real, ultimate version of reality? What if the world on this side, the side in which you and I find ourselves, is precisely the distorted, skewed reflection of the true order?

You stand there, staring, thinking, “The mirror is turning everything upside down,” but actually, if you think very carefully and closely, you might conclude that it is not the mirror that is playing with your senses, but rather that you, the being on this side of the glass, are the one who has been confused from the beginning. It is as if the world around you is some great cosmic joke in which we have been caught in error since birth, in a mistaken perception. What if the reflection in the mirror is not in fact a “reflection,” but the true version of yourself, the correct and undistorted expression of who you are, while the you who now lives and moves and breathes here on this side is a distorted, misleading caricature of reality?

Take, for example, the idea that a mirror flips left and right. Let’s face it: how can a thin, cold sheet of glass perform such complicated operations? Because left remains left and right remains right – nothing is actually flipped! What the mirror is really doing is showing you what you would see if you looked around, as if you could see another angle of your own body without having to physically turn. So simple, and yet so terrifyingly confusing. And here, dear reader, lies the crux of the mystery: it is not the mirror that deceives us, but our brains, which so stubbornly believe that they live in a linear world in which everything is fixed, when in fact we are wandering around in a kind of visual maze, constantly chasing the illusion of a reality that does not exist.

In this chaotic dance between reflection and reality, it is possible that we will never know where the line is, or if there is a line at all. Who dares to say what is real and what is just a shadow, a reflection, a shadow of something greater, something deeper? Perhaps, if you look in the mirror long enough, you will one day realize that it is you who is living in the mirror image, while the image on the other side is watching you, wondering, “Who is this person, moving as if he belongs here, but can’t see that he is in the mirror image?”