Smoke & Mirrors

“Without darkness there can be no light and without pain there can be no happiness. The events of our lives confuse us and set us back. But without them, there is no such thing as a life fully lived.”

Prelude 

Every day, strangers pass each other and rarely think a thing about the new people they see. They make their initial observations or sometimes no observations at all and they move on. There are nearly eight billion people in the world. That’s just how it goes. But what if we took the time to examine each person in their entirety? To read the way they spoke or walked? The way they sit or the look in their eyes? We would then be able to see the uniqueness in every person. We would see that, even in a mass of people, nobody can ever truly blend in. Regardless of how much they may wish to. 

Familial Bonds to Individual Definitions 

We often define ourselves not by who we are inside but by the traits and actions of the people who surround us. If you take the time to look inside yourself, you’ll be forced to see everything: the good, the bad, and, more than anything, the ugly. Because you are the only person who can truly pull back the layers of scar tissue that hide all of the darkest pieces of yourself, the ones you’ve buried deep and refused to return to. 

The brain is wired to hide the things that are too difficult to comprehend, too heavy to analyze. That doesn’t always mean it should, as holding memories and potential epiphanies hostage from your consciousness prevents growth. If you can’t figure something out, you can’t ever really move on from it. It’s like trying to make yourself float to avoid walking in a massive puddle of mud on the trail before you. It doesn’t work. But we all do it anyway because there’s nothing we can do to control it. Or so we believe. 

In a small Midwestern town, there is a girl by the name of Abigail Elizabeth Snow who was born on the 22nd of June in 2006. She is the daughter of Nick and Alyssa but also Evan, her step-father known simply as “Dad” to her. She is the step-sister of Evan’s sons Harvey, Jacob, and David and the paternal half-sister of Jessica and two other siblings she knows little about, a stark display of her father’s absence in her life. But above all, she is the maternal half-sister of Michael, the sibling she is closest to. 

It’s her family that defines her, as if their experiences and deeds all rest under her picture in the dictionary of people. Even if no one is thinking of them when they see her, she is. She believes they must be judging her for what they’ve done just as she’s always judging and blaming herself. Deep down. So she shrinks back. 

Separate from everyone else is the pale girl with broad shoulders and eyes evidently empty. In the back of the room, her thin lips shut and sitting in a chair, completely still, with her feet planted on the floor. She shuffles as she walks, in no hurry to reach any destination. She has surrendered herself to the will of the world, released the steering wheel and allowed her car to careen off a cliff in hopes it will land steadily. 

Her quiet form is not easy to approach and her walls, while not necessarily difficult to break, are oddly shaped to keep each threat to her stability out. It’s difficult to open up in a world so willing to shoot you down, but it’s just as deadly not to. 

All she longs for, like most of us, is a meaningful relationship with someone. Platonic or, if the universe allows it, romantic. To move to the city and live an exciting life with a lifelong partner. To not only be loved but to feel loved. 

But when something hurts you, it’s instinct to protect yourself. To block out the full power of that memory and avoid any situation that may lead to a resurfacing of the pain it caused. The world is not a kind place, and your gut knows that. It won’t let you off easy. 

The most effective way to avoid these negative feelings is to blend in. Drawing attention to yourself will only bring about more opportunities for failure. Wear clothes that conform to the situation and the setting, don’t paint your nails, keep the jewelry to a minimum, sit in the back row, choose your words with care. Then, you won’t get hurt. Right? 

It doesn’t matter how hard you try. You can’t avoid it. Not really. Even if you avoid all outside conflict, you will only have succeeded in isolating yourself and creating a conflict of the mind. You will have left yourself vulnerable to its whims and deep, innate desire for excitement in life. Either that or you will find yourself settling for a situation or a person you think will keep you safe and secure and only end up displeased. Too often is that the cycle of life, and rarely does its beginning not stem from the impact those around you have had on your heart, most notably the ones you’re supposed to be bonded with. Tied together for life. Family. 

The fractures almost always have more impact than the glue that tries to hold the pieces together. David and Harvey come around when they need money and they don’t pay it back. Harvey got into a relationship with a minor—a boy only a year above Abigail in school—and attempted to keep it a secret, an embarrassment to the family. Jacob did the worst. With the mother of his two daughters, he got into drug use and while she got clean after the kids were taken from them, he did not. Rather, they got into an argument and he pulled a gun on her in front of the girls. He remains in prison today. It all lingers in the background at every moment, even when nobody is conscious of it. So, Abigail aims to protect herself. 

Not even Michael can make up for it, regardless of how close he and Abigail are. Even if he tries. He can stay out of trouble, remain the only one who has never done anything to risk the safety or reputation of their family, and continue to be Abigail’s favorite sibling. A half-brother by technicality but a brother of full blood in every way that matters. There for her when she needs him, even if they fight like every other set of siblings inevitably does. The one she cares for most, whose name sparks a light in her eyes. It doesn’t matter how much she loves him or how much love he shows her. By instinct, the negative will always outweigh the positive. 

Small Town vs. Big Dream 

Abigail’s home is a small town in the southern half of Missouri that had a population of approximately fifteen thousand residents as of the year 2020. It’s a town that places much focus on the topics of agriculture, welding, and medicine and can often leave room for little else, with citizens that constantly circle through the strong desire to leave for a bigger city but never do. It’s quiet and private, but everybody knows everybody. Finding a place to be yourself without anybody you’ve known for the majority of your life is a near-impossible feat. 

Big cities hold their appeal with their noise and lights and towering buildings and people that crowd the streets. It’s an idea Abigail loves to think about, but like many where she’s from, she isn’t sure whether or not she could ever pursue it. To feel that way is completely normal. Regardless of how much a person may long to leave home, there’s always going to be a part of them that doesn’t want to. It’s instinctual. Most people don’t spend every day dreaming of moving across the country or even the world all alone. To a new place with new people and new ideas. Choosing not to follow that desire is not a sign of weakness, and it’s not always simply the decision to settle. It’s circumstance. It’s a product of emotion. 

In June of 2022, Abigail spent three weeks at an academic camp for Missouri high school students. There, being homesick was far from something a person can be blamed for. It’s in that experience that she found that her love for big cities may be just that. A love. Not a longing. Sometimes, dreams are better off unfulfilled. It leaves meaning and purpose in life. It leaves somewhere to go, even if one knows they will never reach it. But who’s to say? A person who breathes is a person with the potential to do anything they please. If only they are willing to find it. 

What the Mirror Says 

Every piece of Abigail’s story seems to be hanging over the edge of a cliff. It could drop or it could hold on. There’s no way to know. Its strength differs with each passing day. Sometimes, it’s easier that way. It isn’t natural for people to go about their days without being completely sure of themselves at one moment and second-guessing the next. There are days on which you look in the mirror and feel good, the days when being yourself is easier, when standing up for yourself in the face of all those who seek to push you down is a possibility if not a given. But then there are the harder days, when the mirror says “You are not good enough” and everyone whose eyes glance your way or who laughs at anything is looking or laughing at you. Commitment and trust are unrealistic on these days. They must be. To combat the fear of betrayal. 

It’s extremely difficult if not impossible for Abigail to escape the person she was when she was a kid or the actions of her family in a place where everybody already knows everything. People will still see her for who she was, and if they do notice how she’s begun to change, they’ll think something must be wrong. Change is an integral part of life that is required to move from one stage to the next—like the transition from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly—but for the cowardly nature of mankind, it’s too scary of a concept. When others block it, there’s no room to grow or to move toward the filling of a dream such as Abigail’s. 

There are many ways to try and escape this prison that operates under the guise of freedom, but they don’t often work out the way you hope they will. Parting with a group of people who have one idea about you in an attempt to find people with no previous misconceptions is one of them. Each year, almost like clockwork, Abigail is known to become a member of a new group of friends only to end up separating from them for the next year’s group. 

As friends go, only Anna is a constant. Even as they each grow and change and become close with different people, she’s the one Abigail has always been able to go to and confide in no matter what, even after time apart. Ever since the third grade. Her support provides power through loss and hardship. It’s reliable. A necessity. If you don’t have anyone to help pick you back up when you fall, how could you ever be expected to find the motivation to be strong? 

There’s strength, of course, in independence too, but it stems from the subconscious knowledge that you are important and cared for. That you require the same urgency from someone else that you do from yourself. But if the instances in which you are made to feel that way are in the minority of your experiences, it’s difficult to believe the few positive moments you’ve had didn’t stem from pity. Even if there are fewer negatives, they will still always outweigh the positives by nature. Especially during childhood, it’s trauma that sticks as the brain’s strategy to protect itself from similar experiences later on, almost like the creation of antibodies by the immune system to protect from future illness. 

The World in Slow Motion 

It was a Monday in April of 2016, Abigail’s fourth-grade year, that seems always to have held some of that weight. The day before, she had wrecked her bicycle as many kids do and skinned her palms on the concrete. She covered those wounds with bandages to ward off infection and to protect herself from further pain. But it was the bandages that helped to create a situation of greater significance. Bandages can be finicky, especially when it comes to an area of the body such as a hand that is consistently used and accumulates excess amounts of moisture throughout the day. They slip, and they peel. They distract. 

That Monday, it came time for recess and, with bandages wrapped around her hands, young Abigail decided it was her wish to go on the swing. So she did. She swang high as the swing would allow her to go. All the way back, all the way forward, all the way back, all the way forward. She swang and she swang until the wind in her hair must have made it feel as if she were flying and given her all the freedom a child could possibly come to know. But it wouldn’t last long. Her bandages had begun to slip. 

As the swing came back once again, she attempted to adjust those failing bandages but succeeded instead in losing her grip on the swing and tumbling to the ground. She landed with her wrists crossed over each other, possessing the ability only to scream. The sound was muffled in her ears, as nobody came to help. A lone teacher walked slowly down the ramp that led from the doors of the elementary school to the playground, talking absently into her walkie-talkie. There was no hurry in her step. 

To an injured child, the time it took this teacher to walk down the ramp was equivalent to an eternity, as was the walk up to the nurse’s office on which she was dragged not by the shoulder or the upper arm but her forearm. Just beside where the injury had occurred. 

Abigail was sure her wrists must be broken, but the theory of the adults was that they were merely sprained. They squeezed them to check, only another piece of pain added to a moment already submerged in it. There was little urgency involved in the situation. The school called Abigail’s mother, who was later the one to take her to the hospital. 

Both wrists were, in fact, broken, and damage had been done to the growth plate in her right wrist. She had surgery to avoid improper growth in that wrist and had no independence in the following weeks, unable to eat, dress, shower, or use the bathroom on her own. But though she had to learn to use her left hand over her dominant right as the growth plate healed, it all worked out in the end. 

It could have gone very differently. It was the hypothesis of her doctors that had she fallen with her arms out in a plank position rather than with her wrists crossed, she would have slammed her face into the ground and her nose would have been shoved back into her brain, an injury not likely to be survivable. But though that didn’t happen and her wrists healed, damage was still done outside of the realm of the physical. It’s difficult to believe you matter when, as a child in their worst moment, nobody is in a rush to help. It leads to a realization that you are unbelievably alone in the world. 

What They Don’t Understand 

Everybody has their way of trying to reason things, trying to convince themselves that they do have a purpose in the world and someone is there for them. They grasp things in the dark and they don’t listen to reason. What they don’t understand, they will condemn. They search for explanations that explain all of the things they can’t wrap their heads around, all the things that scare them. More often than not, those explanations come from the religious teachings that have overtaken the world for years. 

Abigail comes from a religious family, which most would assume makes religion in her life a given. But there’s such a thing as having your own thoughts and feelings on a subject, and as she got older and church became less of a frequent in life, she began to do just that. Form her own ideas about what she had been taught. 

Church made her uncomfortable, with the thought always in the back of her mind that everybody there would find out she wasn’t committed to it and judge her for it as they tended to judge her—at least in her mind—about everything else. It led to arguments with her mother, who regretted not pushing religion harder and thought not doing so had made her a bad mom. Conversations between the two of them began to lack substance, as the doors of an open relationship began to close. Tired of it, Abigail started pushing harder to be heard. 

One day, as if by a miracle, her mom began to dial back and listen. Accustomed to being shut down and treated like a second thought, it was odd for Abigail to be listened to, to be made to feel as if her thoughts and feelings were valid. Her mom had taken the time to consider their relationship and, therefore, allowed them once again to grow close. Damage, she learned, can be healed if only given the chance. 

I Am What You Have Made Me 

There is some damage that can’t be healed once it’s done. When a pane of glass shatters into a million pieces, it can’t be taped back together. Sometimes, the pieces can be melted down and molded into something new but never can they return to their exact previous state of being in the same shape beside the same pieces as before. Each harmful event has an impact of its own that breaks the glass differently, sometimes into a piece so small it can’t be picked up to be renewed. It gets missed. The missing pieces are the worst, the defacing ones that become ghosts in the backdrop of life. 

Feelings of abandonment, betrayal, confinement, and insignificance or the feeling that you are not being heard are the culprits that set the stage. There comes a point at which the pieces lost to those feelings are more abundant than the pieces that remain big enough to be collected and reshaped. At that point, there’s a sense of hopelessness. What’s the point in going on when you can’t possibly be important any longer? 

Especially in a place such as her hometown in which it is not so simple to escape, being overshadowed is easy. There is no individuality or validation; oftentimes, there is no sense of direction. You are your family and your friends. You are your school and your activities. You are your childhood and what everyone already knows about you, and you are not allowed to become anything else. You are nothing, and you are no one. Painfully visible yet completely invisible to the average person’s eye. Stained yet a completely blank slate. A ghost just like all of the missing pieces that have been swept under the rug. 

Nobody reacts to anything the same as somebody else would. Pushed down and made to feel less than everyone else, less than they are, some turn their backs on the world. Some withdraw, and others embrace everything they can see. Some hide, and others throw themselves into the open, cuddle up in a blanket burrito or throw themselves off a cliff. Either literally or figuratively. 

Some people say that if the world insists on painting them as a villain, they might as well become just that. There is no use in trying to be good when they will always think of you as the bad guy, the person whose presence will ruin their livelihood or take their life. In reclaiming those ideas, there can be power. To sit down and say “I am what you have made me” and call it the end of the story. 

But you can be what others have made you without necessarily becoming what the world refers to as a villain. That’s only the most extreme result. Typically, it’s simpler. “You called me ugly so now I see myself as such.” “You made me a loser so that is all I am.” “You categorized me as hateful and now I hate you.” “I am what you make me.” 

Society has ideas about what makes a person good or evil, ugly or pretty, smart or stupid, and so on. Those ideas seep into everyday life like a cancer of the heart, spreading throughout the body and poisoning the brain. It can make showing one’s true self a near-impossible task to accomplish. Whether it’s putting on a mask or physically hiding away, there are plenty of ways to put off the pain of having to reveal the truth to the world. But putting it off is all that can be done. Someone will inevitably break the dam behind which the water hides. The absence of that experience is a rarity. 

Some, though they may hide how they feel, also express their hopes through what they attempt to do for others. If they want to feel happy, they are over-enthusiastic, and if they want to feel loved, they show love to others. They want others to feel how they do not to keep them from feeling the same negativity they have. They are attempting to protect other people as they could not protect themselves. 

In the Face of a Tiger 

Abigail has openly defined herself as a person who cares for others but also for themselves. She runs on the belief that making others happy is what will lead to her fulfillment. That making them feel what she wishes to will allow her to achieve it herself. It leaves her vulnerable to the whims and wrongdoings of others. Utterly out of control, prepared to sink or float based on how well another person knows how to tread water rather than learning to swim herself. Watching a city burn down and hoping someone else grabs a bucket of water. 

If she were to be trapped somewhere—say, an arena—with her favorite person in the world and a hungry tiger destined to hurt one of them, her choice would be simple. Even if the level of injury wouldn’t necessarily be the same for each of them. Even if the other person would die and therefore not suffer and she would survive with the loss of her arms and legs. In answering the question, she didn’t miss a beat. She would sacrifice herself. 

Many people would see the actions she takes as simply selfless, but their reality might be deeper than that. Her reasoning for making her choice was definitive, almost as if she had thought about it a thousand times before. She would choose to save her person because she knows where her life is headed but not where theirs is. She doesn’t know what potential they may have. All she seems to know is that however much potential it is, it must be more than she has. Her heart is on her sleeve, and the walls around it are thin, if only the time is taken to figure out how to break them down. Like finding the momentum to break through a window with your fist. There’s no fail-safe to be seen within a million miles. A form of escapism controlled not by your subconscious but by the lives of others. 

Regardless of how hard you try, you can’t place yourself into someone else’s story. Not fictional and certainly not real. You can get to a point where you feel as if you’ve succeeded but you’re only lying to yourself. You’ll never make it that way. It’s placing yourself in a romance book and saying all of your satisfactions have been met or becoming the hero in a fantasy story rather than doing anything about the conflicts that surround you. The only person who can live your story is you, and the only person who can live another person’s story is them. 

If you believe anything otherwise, you have set yourself up to fail. Miserably. And you’ll be left to wonder why it hurts so bad. Why does your heart feel as if it’s about to explode in your chest and why has the lump in your throat grown so large you can’t breathe? Why has your heart been scraped against a cheese grater over and over again until there was nothing left of it? Why do you feel so cold? It’s because you have allowed the world around you to become a dementor, sucking the life out of you until there is nothing left to take. Until you exist no longer. 

When the Sun Sets 

Every event, every instance in your life is what leads you to become the person you are, with the ideas you hold about yourself, those around you, and the world in general. It’s easy to feel invisible. To come to the belief that your existence is merely a trick of the cosmos. You are a character created for the universe’s entertainment. From our families to our friends, everyone brings us to a place of believing that we are ghosts in the background, never to be valued or noticed by another person. We care for others but do not always stand up for ourselves. Sometimes, it is others’ experiences and emotions that we live through, reliant on them to experience the world in its entirety. But that’s not necessarily possible. 

We all have dreams, the question is: will we follow the path that leads toward them or away? When our sun sets, will we be satisfied? We live this life only once and at the end of it—there’s no way to know what happens then. Only you can travel through the unique series of experiences set ahead of you. You exist in your entirety through a mix of fate and free will. So, remember you are not looking through the window of somebody else’s house, on the outside looking in. You see through your own eyes and it is when you realize that, that you can finally be free. That you can lay waste to the smoke and mirrors. 

*Based on a true story; all names and identifying details changed for privacy purposes

© July 2024 Edition (Updated From June 2022 Original Edition)