reflections.

there are parts of you that you never knew were there, that hide behind what you are, or at least; who you choose to look like to the rest of the world. there is a purity within, that is tainted and altered as it is being shone through the filters and screens that are our appearances. and somehow it survives. it persists. perpetually illuminating, and ever so often it reaches our conscious thoughts unscathed. and it is times like those, that really teach you what it means to be here.

there was a little girl once. she was born small, and sick. she was born an addict. the hospital sheets hardly had time to absorb the warmth of her mother's body, before her mother was gone. she packed only her suitcase, and left only her promises. the little girl didn't know this person, or who she was to her. she did know that her face was the first thing she'd seen when her life began. and she trusted that. somehow.

the little girl was taken home to a place she'd never seen, by a man she'd never met. a man her mother had scarcely met. a man whose ethics outweighed his abilities to forget. but then, the liquor helped with that. she listened to him scream, and she seemed to think that the harder she squeezed her eyes shut the less it would hurt when he touched her. at least she could hear him. at least she could feel him. at least he wasn't gone. not completely, anyway.

ten years would pass, the little girl was learning quickly. she already knew how to double-clutch the man's truck the swiftest route between the pub and the trailer, without waking him up in the passenger's seat floor. she knew which carseats the cops wouldn't drug-tap, and how many tiles were on the ceiling of every room in the house. the man told her she looked like her mother. but the things the girl had learned and seen of the mother scared her. the things she didn't know of the man she shared a home with scared her just as much. her bruises and scars were hidden from the eyes of anyone who would care. funny, she thought, of all the shooting stars she has wasted wishing for someone who cared- her biggest concern now was hiding from them.

she would read to pass the time. any words she could find, she made sense of them. applied meaning to them. dreamed dreams within them. in her classroom she stood taller than the rest, but only when she got to read out loud. only when she could tell the world- well, a room full of 12 year olds- just how she planned to save their lives one day. just how she planned to save the world. only when she knew she could make them understand what's out there, and how much bigger it was than she, or they. or anything. and everyday, she would go home with hope- finding what she expected. she would promise god on her knees at night that she'd make up for the lives wasting around her, if only he'd give her the chance.

she walks home today to the same place, down the same road, with the same pub lights showering the same bodies on the same sidewalk. she still knows how to pick the man out from the pile. she still knows how to keep from being caught staring when she see's the mother out; laughing happily, with a new baby in her arms. the little girl is unrecognizable to this woman now, but still- she watches from afar. she still knows how to pick the locks of the doors she was so frequently thrown into, locked out of. she still cries when she lies about why the man is too busy to meet someone important to her, about when the mother will finally get that big break and call, just to say it's okay to come around.

she still has the same dimples that her mother has. she still has the same dreams that man left behind. and even though she has neither of them, she does have something that's going to take her farther than she ever daydreamed in that classroom.

she has faith.

so let it be said, that when life loses you along the way, and when those you once trusted, and those you could have loved, leave you behind- the days in front of you are because of the days behind you. And the glass seperating the two can be one of two very similar yet fundamentally opposite things:

a mirror, or a window.