The moment when I looked at the mirror in front of me, a girl was standing there, with her long blonde plaited hair that hung at her waist, she beamed a surly smile at me, derisively and contemptuously, rubbing salt in the wound that had been there forever. I knew I had to do something, she was a monster, a nightmare that came haunting me in a dream that I was currently in. Or maybe she was only a manifestation, a spirit. Yes! That was what she was!

Or maybe I was drunk; I was not sober enough. Alcohol had over empowered me; I was dreaming: she was my hallucination. But even when she was only a hallucination, I didn't want her to be there, that I swore out loud, and her mouth copied the same thing I just spat at her. I spat at the reflection, swore at her, yelling for her to go away. But she did nothing but imitating me, the anger boiled inside my chest, and I had thought my heart would burst any second. My chest heaved up and down heavily, I didn't stop swearing until I felt my lungs would stop working. Propping myself up using my arms, panting, I looked down and refrained from smashing the reflective glass.

The society was such a horrible place, a place full of jealousy and hatred; full of greed. And the people, people that thought of themselves as such sophisticated creatures, their selfishness had blinded them, their greed had made them unstoppable. They wouldn't accept someone different, someone like me. They lived with apathy, they thrived with oblivion.

"Apathy is a sort of living oblivion."—Horace Greeley

Now, you would think that I would have put a period to my life from all the depression deep down, but no, I kept on surviving, putting just a semicolon after each clause of my dramatic life, carrying a public façade that masked my own despair. I had lost my hope to this world, but I kept faking it, living with a secret that this world will never accept, burying it in.

But now that the secret had come to haunt me, like insurmountable maces coming at once. I looked up, glaring at the girl in the mirror, my secret identity.

No way. No way! No way could she be my identity, no, never, I don't permit it. Never ever would I accept it. I don't want to be humiliated, it had already been enough for me to bear. No! No! I finally smashed the mirror with much ferocity, refused to use anything else but my hands, let the physical pain deluge the thought. I lunged at the pieces of broken glass, punching it, breaking it, let it tear at my veins, let the blood come pouring out. But the girl was still there, now a multitude of her! They mocked me with their eyes, their cold blooded smile, their identical stare....

Losing all my might, I sat down on the floor sobbing into my sleeves, my hands screamed for painkiller, my shirt and jeans stained with blood. The room smelled of copper, too. The crimson fluid kept flowing relentlessly.

I thought of my mom, her beautiful yet wild eyes, the wildness from her young days. She was a really lovable woman, and an understanding mom and wife. I loved her so much. I missed her dishes, the meals she made. I missed her homemade lunch that she stuffed in my lunchbox. And I missed her smile, her rare melodic laugh that remained ringing in my ears forever. And now that I had become something unacceptable comparing to the social standard, I didn't have the gut to bare meeting her again, the shame was too much.

And then there was my dad, my man, my best man, he was full of strictness that a father should have, but apart from that, there was also a sweet side of him of being a husband and a father. I missed the fishing trips he brought me with, and his laugh lines that fit so well to his authentic and funny self.

I loved them so much, more than my stupidly embarrassing and irredeemable life, more than anything, more than my despicable self. And above all, more than the girl staring at me from the smashed mirror. Yes, I loved her, but no, I didn't love her. This cycle of debating would go on forever. But I loved her more than myself. At least that was what I know.

I had come to the point when everything imploded inside of me. The truth, the treacherous, anticlimactic truth, and all the damn social standards that were to define every human being. Humanity had rotted into something emotionless, sensationless, now replaced by affectations. What one wears defined them; what one drives represented them; which phone one uses determined them.

The inexplicable fact that everybody now obliviously tried to pleasure the others around them that they forget themselves seems so ridiculous. Their demeanors are not even genuine at all, I had always been trying to hide what I felt, but I'm too tired, now, of holding this inside my head. Because somewhere in my brain, it sanctioned how I behaved to the public. I didn't pout, I didn't spoil my facade with sadness, I decided my facade to the world despite what's going on inside.

It was like living in Utopia, but deep down, you know you're in Dystopian.

It was like justice was often synonymous with vengeance to the ancient Greek.

A few hours after that, after having cleaned up everything, and swathed the cut arm in layers of bandages, the cuts were starting to bother me now, but I didn't feel anything at all before, like something was couraging me to do it before my body even recognized what exactly was I was doing. It was uncontrollable. But repentance wasn't there, I didn't regret it, I actually felt relieved now, getting the burden off my mind. I laid on my bed, staring through the gossamer curtain out to the city beyond it, lit up with neon lights. At the moment, I felt like I was a Utopian living in Dystopia.

Carpe diem.

It was amazing and thrilling, you know, the pain, I mean. It was amazing how the pain calmed me. It was thrilling that deliberately hurting myself suddenly turned me into a person who appreciated their live.