The Shtriga’s Exposed Reflection

In school, I was taught that 

mirrors were windows into the soul, 

but for the past couple years, 

mirrors have only been windows 

into my madcap blemishes and irregularities. 

Each time I look into the mirror, 

my self-pleasure is a coin toss 

that overwhelmingly prefers tails.

And those brief, haphazard 

blips of victory often accompany 

much discomfort and exhaustion, 

and even then I am still 

the Strange Man to most who see me. 

I am Narcissus and I am Orlok. 

My vanity and my spectrophobia 

rage against each other like 

giants in a thunderstorm. 

I am a hedonist who 

can’t even be pleased by myself. 

What use then am I? I am 

blessed with the most empathetic, supporting fellowship of friends 

in my entire twenty-six years of existence, but I am equally 

cursed with so much self-abhorrence

that accepting their love 

for even a second would leave me entrapped in a straightjacket vulnerability. 

I am the leper to my own salvation. 

So I trick myself into suspecting trickery. 

If they love me in my makeup, 

then I am deceiving, 

if they love me without, 

then I am deceived. 

And while in the deepest 

crevices of my soul, I want to 

believe my friends’ unctuousness 

is genuine, I fret their efforts 

to deflect the cascade of bullets 

that is my own dysphoria and 

others’ malice, is ultimately sickening

those I love most. Their love is 

a radiant gala, but I am the Red Death.

Life is eternally exhausting, 

and I find more every day that 

I’m not very good at it. 

I desire absolute adoration 

and stupendous scorn. 

But never, ever, ever, ever solitude. 

Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then, I contradict myself. 

(I am nothing, I contain oblivions). 

I stand at the tip of the promontory, 

mist pushing and washing 

my Masc, as my reflection in 

the tides below blur like a

New England mirage. If I leap now, 

will the gales rise from beneath my feet

and carry me from Sea to See? 

Will I fall and the current beat me 

away like some great behemoth 

trying to wear down its 

enemy, as I claw across 

unmovable rocks and choke on myself?  

Will I fall and impale myself on 

one of the caveless stalagmites below, 

sacrificing myself to warn 

ye who dare doth commit 

the irredeemable crime of exposure? 

Worst of all, will the gust simply 

blow me back to the promontory, 

dooming me never to move 

anywhere again but back?