Who Are YOU?

I was talking to myself in front of my grandparent’s very old mirror one night. That was a year ago.

My Uncle was staring up the ceiling probably counting cobwebs and wondering why I was staring at myself. (My Uncle is a 40 year old less than normal person who has not left home for ages and Lola is the one who takes care of him).

My sisters were outside watching TV while my brothers were playing with the neighbors. Nanay was off somewhere (can’t remember where) and Lola was doing the usual chores outside as well.

In my Lola’s room, I stood before the long mirror reflecting a visage I had not really looked at for many years.

When I was a young harridan, I never bothered combing my hair in front of the mirror. I would just snag a hairbrush, dash out of the house and comb my hair while riding a tricycle to school.

I started powdering my face only after I saw my younger sister do that and I started using colognes when my sisters bought their own colognes and I could borrow from them.

I never really looked at myself in the mirror since I conceived an odd plot about mirrors being dimensional doors to other worlds.

When I was a kid, I often stare at the mirror for a very long time, not to look at how pretty I am (I am pretty, in a way. I had a classmate who was once obsessed with that childish face, that is why I had to rub her off my person). I usually looked at the mirror to stare at my eyes and then, I would start getting dizzy and ….

When I first read encounters of the Fourth (was it fifth?) kind, I suspected myself of being abducted by aliens since I suffered from memory gaps and blanks. There were periods in my childhood that I do not have any recollection of.

I do not know why, really but there were points in those younger days when I could not string a coherent memory of what happened to me. There were some very vivid recollections of conversations I had with older people but I cannot really recall some points and aspects of my student days especially those points when I was in Grade I and Grade II.

There were gaps also to my memory record of events which happened to me in the later part of my third grade in elementary and the later part also of my fourth grade.

The gaps stopped when I reached second year highschool. That was when I stopped staring at my eyes in the mirror too.

I started using compacts last month and found out that looking through your eyes with the use of a compact does not have the same hair raising effect as looking at a mirror, especially old ones.

My Lolas mirror, unfortunately, is an old one which she bought using her first savings as a hilot. My Lola believes that her abilities came from creatures she calls her and our families ubay - whatever that i.

The mirror was as tall as I am and hile staring at it, I saw another person staring back at me.

The girl in Lolas mirror was very fat and very rumpled. She was weaing a tattered housedress (the reason why she often refuses to leave the room). She could have been pretty if she were not that fat and unkempt.

Whoa, I thought. Who is that? Was that one of Lola's spirit guides? I turned around to look at where she is supposed to be standing...

But there was no one. Hehe. Ako gali to.

It was me. Drat. I did not know I am that ugly. I allowed time and the world to control me, as a person and as a being. The real me inside is no longer visible outside.

I am this fat, overindulged creature who refused the world's advice to slim down because she was too busy burying her nose in tomes.

When I had the chance to lift my nose out of books, it was to see that the pretty little girl child I once was, is no longer around.

I have grown up into this shy and self-demeaning creature who saw herself as inferior to verybody else.

Then, I stared hard at the mirror. where was that little girl everybody adored? Was she a figment of my imagination? Was she taken away by the fairy creatures and replaced by this horrible looking witch.

I stared hard... and found her. Deep inside the eyes of the ugly witch.