YBFJ

Chapter Four: Mirrors

Goddammit.

I’m so tired of this fuckin’ shit.

Mirrors. Mirrors everywhere. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling — even the damn ceiling itself. I look up and see myself looking down. I look left and see the me I left behind. I look right and see who I might’ve been if I hadn’t gotten so twisted.

I want to smash them all. Paint them. Mute them.

I want to take my chapstick, my lipstick, a shard of bone, my own blood if I have to, and write across every single one:

I AM ENOUGH.

I AM THAT.

I AM ENOUGH.

But they don’t believe me.
They shimmer and sneer, those mirrors — not with my face, but with some older version of it. One that remembers what I try to forget.

And outside — out there in that mockery of life — the grass is too green, and the trees smoke cigarettes just to spite me. Their leaves fall like notes from a cruel lover: clean this, Leviathan, clean up what we gave you.

I say no.
I say Oomba logger, and I mean it like a curse, like a vow. My grandfather’s sacred nonsense. My resistance anthem.

And still, the light comes.

The other day I woke up and saw it — a white light, blinding, searing, like the end of a life or the start of one I didn’t ask for. It shone right through my eyelids, into the root of my brain.

I pulled the curtains.
I covered myself in sheets.
I turned the fan on — loud, hurricane loud — to drown it out.
I taped my mouth shut.
I poured glue into my ears.

But the eyes. The eyes.

As for my eyes, I offered them to the birds. Little ravens sat on the doorstep, cooing like priests. One of them might’ve been a hawk, proud and sharp, and I let it in.

Let it peck gently. Let it take what it came for.

I know there’s an owl out there waiting.
Not for death. For initiation.

And there’s one more.

The one that walks on four but stands on two when it needs to.

That one watches me even now. It doesn’t blink. It never has. It will speak only once — and I must answer with my true name. Not Leviathan. Not Dean. Not Star Finger.

The name no mirror has ever shown me.