He laughed, and then he looked up, and the mirror was right there.
It was the same mirror.
A long time ago, a boy had looked into it and screamed a word he had never said out loud before. That boy had grey eyes and a few sad hairs and teeth like a piranha. He had legs like twigs and the upper body of somebody else. He had sat on this floor for a whole night with his arms around his knees.
After that he had wrapped himself up like a bandit raccoon and gone outside to buy rotten meat.
He remembered the push-ups on this floor, between the bed and the desk, where the crystals were now. The first night he had managed two, and the second one had been mostly his face. He remembered lying there afterwards with his cheek on the cold boards, listening to the fridge hum, thinking that two was still more than one.
He remembered eating at that desk with the TV on for company, because a voice talking about the weather was better than no voice at all.
