The Macy Mirror

Flash Fiction | 3 Minute Read

This is another story from the “Rivera Runs Through It” blog archives. Again, it was written more than a decade ago. This one was for a prompt group called the Trifecta. I used to love those prompts!

This is a 3 minute read.

image created by Nicole Rivera using CanvaPro

THE MACY MIRROR

My last patient came straight from school. She wore jeans, boots, dark make-up and a face that told me she wasn’t thrilled with this appointment. I started there, “Macy, why do you think you’re here?”

She leaned over with her elbows on her knees, and met me with confident, piercing blue eyes. “Mom thinks there’s something wrong with me.” She smirked. “She’s convinced I’m getting bullied. She thinks I’m miserable because I’m friendless. So, in her effort to ‘cure’ me, she sends me here to seek a resolution to my loneliness.”

“Are you lonely?” I interjected.

“That’s hilarious,” she said, leaning back and flinging her arms across the back of the couch, “I’m overwhelmed by the throngs around me! I’m alone for my own sanity.”

I raised my eyebrows. Patients always discussed how their actions were for the sake of sanity. “What do you mean by that?”

“Here’s the thing,” she said, as if confiding some deeply held secret, “I watch them band together around fads, reality shows, or - worst of all - boy bands. I watch them grasp on tendrils of a commonality in efforts to clone themselves. I watch them flee from the euphoria of individuality and I can’t understand why. To belong?” She stopped for a moment, looking over me, through a window with no view. “I tell Mom this and she tells me that’s living, but I wonder: whose life are you living if it’s just a copy?”

I felt like I was looking into some time-warping mirror. I let Macy go on about everything she’d figured out about the world and about how she’s above it all. Part of me envied her certainty. Another part of me remembered her mother’s anguish.

I let Macy leave my office sure that she taught me a thing or two. I let her maintain the belief that she was walking the world stoically alone. I remembered the power in that thinking. Then I picked up the phone and called my mother.

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