The Mirror

Okay, so I suppose this is my first "official" post on here. I suppose it's stupid to say "Enjoy", so I guess I'll just say, "Read and if you enjoy it, awesome, if not, awesome." I think that kind of works... I'll work on it.

The Mirror

Several years ago now, in a restaurant on a bustling street, there was a commotion. It’s not like it was unlike other days, really- the ones where the customers make a stir and everyone gets a free drink because the owner was afraid of losing business- but there was something terribly more sinister at the heart of this dispute.

A man had heard some sort of terrible news on his cellular device, and had caused a stir that would not leave a single witness unscathed. He had been sitting there at his little table alone, eating some sort of liquid broth aggressively when his phone rang. In an instantaneous movement, he flipped his table over onto the ground in a loud spine-chilling crash of metal on tile. Of course, the other patrons were disturbed. The hot soup on the table followed a trajectory and flew at a woman and spilled all over the front of her expensive blouse nearly scalding her, which then prompted her husband to spring from his seat to defend her honor because of how her reputation affected his.

The man with the cell phone had begun to swear and beat his own head and tear at his hair in some sort of strange fit of rage. It didn’t take long before he began grappling with another man just to help him relieve himself of his anger. He grabbed a waiter who had only come over to right the table and apologize and the angry man smacked him fully in the face. The young waiter didn’t waste time balking at his attacker, he simply retaliated with his own meatier punch. The man still clung to his cell phone as he landed hard on his back on the brown floor with a sound of flesh compacting and crunching against ceramic tile.

Then of course, the husband of the woman who had been assaulted by the bowl of soup took his chance to get in a quick blow, and he picked the winded and slightly dented fellow off of the brown tile as if he were a child and threw him down again as if he were a piece of trash. The husband then grunted to himself like an ape. Now that he felt rather proud of his masculinity, he dragged his terrified wife out of the restaurant by using her delicate white wrist like a leash.

With their departure, the whole room became deathly silent. The angry man huffed on the ground and whined about some sort of hernia in some sort of unpleasant cavity, and then he got onto the mature topic of suing. Of course, the manager came over and begged him not to sue, pleading as if her very life depended on his decision. Perhaps it did, I never quite bothered to ask her if she owned the place.

While they bristled and spat at each other, something else was surfacing from the depth of his mind and crawling toward his mouth, attempting to break out. He broke, and there it came, the sob that wrenched out of his very soul made every person in the room flinch as if they had been struck. After his first cry, several people bolted from the small restaurant, others stared, and one or two tried to console the newly broken man.

A child sat with his mother at a high bar stool table, awestruck by the emotional display of pain. He had never seen such intensity and rage from any person he had ever come across. It was difficult to discern if he had been excited or disturbed by this interruption of childhood. The obvious difference though, was that in the span of a minute of action, he had aged about ten years. He was only ten to start with, but now he knew that he could never quite go back to school and pretend that he hadn’t seen something he would carry with him for years until he landed on some therapists’ couch when he was in his mid-thirties. His mother refused to accept that her son would be tainted by such an event, so she dragged him away in much the same fashion as the ape fellow took away his property a minute before.

The waiter who had been attacked had run down the street in embarrassment, he knew that he was fired and that there wasn’t any use coming back because he would probably be held responsible for the whole mess. His jaw smarted with his realization, but his pride had really been the one who had been injured in the scrap. He kept flipping around about what his family would think of their son who had assaulted a customer. No matter what he told anyone, he knew that there wasn’t any hope that someone would take pity on him long enough to believe his story because in the end of the matter, he was indeed held responsible and sued and court-ordered to a long series of anger management classes that would go on his permanent record.

The broken man who would dirty all of our lives simply cried and rocked on the floor like a child. I didn’t move from my seat during the whole event. Even when the ambulance came and carried him out on a stretcher, I did not stir. I barely felt any empathy towards him. The man was so pathetic that I almost wished that the paramedics would drop him to see if they could knock some sense into the blubbering fool.

I simply left exact change for my meal on the table and left the once happy restaurant knowing that I would never eat there again. None of us who witnessed the breakdown of a man could ever leave that restaurant unchanged.

I saw something that day, I saw the true nature of man. A fickle, selfish, cruel beast that only cared for himself. It was not from the man on the ground where I found this realization, I discovered it when I saw my reflection in the mirror behind him that hung like a monstrous window into another world. Perhaps a world of truth. One better than the one in which we live.