Although most of my compulsions are invisible to others, I did at one time suffer from an absurd relationship with shadows, particularly those in a reflective surface. Today, although niggled and prodded when I stare into a mirror or pane of glass, I can usually summon the skills to walk away. In the bad old days, when the feathered one was a much stronger force, I spent hours standing in front of bathroom mirrors or lounge windows, glaring into my face, battling to get that perfect ‘you’re not going to die’ feeling. This involved lots of blinking and head twitching.
The hours I’ve killed blinking and imagining blinding white lights when I’ve noticed a shadow on my reflection most likely add up to weeks. I thought I’d stamped this particular fire out as I got older, but when I first went travelling, I experienced a resurgence of these specific attacks. I started to walk past mirrors with my eyes closed. But sometimes catching my reflection couldn’t be helped, and I would notice the dark shade of my eye socket, or maybe a shadow cast along a wall.
“Looks like a shadow on a lung,” Crow would say.
I’d become transfixed, stomach churning like a vat of old milk, searching the reflected world for more shadows. Shaded hollows in my cheeks symbolised cancer, so I’d concentrate on a blinding white light and…
What? The cure?
“Yes,” Crow would whisper. “The cure for the cancer in your bones.”
Will this be the last time?
“Of course,” he’d snigger, with rusty scissors on his mind.
I’d loiter in front of the mirror, eyes fixed upon my reflection, imagining a blinding flash of pure white light while Crow blew smoke into my eyes. “That’s not white enough! Do it again!”
God’s light burning bright, except it wasn’t there, just like the cancer and the liver disease and the AIDS virus I imagined swimming in my veins. But Crow always promised this would be the last time, and although he’d lied a million times before, the promise on the table always seemed genuine.
But never trust the Devil.
Eventually I’d capture the evasive white light and could continue with my day. But the gorgon and her nest of snakes were never far away – a glance in the wrong direction and there she was, spitting at me from a blank TV screen, the rear-view mirror of a car, a shop window in the high street.
“A family member will perish in a freak accident,” a snake would hiss.
I’d turn to stone. ‘What should I do?’
“Concentrate Yan, the blinding light will prevent this tragedy, and vanquish me for good.”
‘Let me guess, this will be the very last time?’
“Of course,” Crow would say, a razor smile and the devil in his eye. “One for the road.”
I remember sitting alone in the ramshackle room in Ecuador, glaring at my reflection in the window as my day pack sat useless on the bed. I spent a lot of time in foreign lands blinking in front of a mirror, apparently saving my own life and the lives of loved ones as I pictured dazzling blasts of light erupting around me like atomic explosions.
It’s ironic that I travelled halfway across the world to stare at myself in an empty room. Yet I smiled as I wrote that last sentence, proving to myself that I’m leaps and bounds from where I was before. A few years ago, the bitter frustration at the missed opportunities could see me launch a mug of coffee at the wall – or slam my head against it like a goat headbutting a fence post.
Our house-sitting assignment in Greece is coming to an end and the cat still isn’t dead. We have two more weeks on the island but it’s time to decide where to head next, and there are plenty of options, a million corners of the world we haven’t seen. A part of me wants a country I’ve not set foot in, but a big part feels I should go back somewhere I’ve already visited, a place where the crow ruined my experience the first time around – and there are plenty of those.
Next month is still a mystery to me, but I know that someday I’ll return to a hundred and one places and look beyond the window, instead of what the glass is reflecting back at me.
ocDETOUR 