Shards of glass, from a broken mirror, laid scattered around her. The cuts in her knuckles left her with pinches of discomfort, but mostly, regret. She sat on the cold, damp floor with her head between her knees, over shadowed by the darkness of inner demons. All their words kept replaying in her mind; each feeling like a stab to the heart and nourishment to the growing self-hate. She remembered the day; the boys mocked her feminine clothes and the tiny ragged doll she clenched tightly in her little fists. When she finally made it to college in her late teens, she was derided for wearing a crimson shaded lipstick on the very first day; and so, like a delicate rose crushed by the weight of a strangers step, she sat in an isolated corner with no friends and an abandoned dignity. She remembered it all. The memories replayed themselves over and over.
Life in the real world became worse. Her educational achievements were never appreciated. The most she could land with was a job as a tailor's assistant, at a shop resting in the untouched part of Karachi. Customers sneered and ridiculed the owner for hiring such a blasphemy, business was lost to a pool of ignorance; so she ended up on the streets of the city that gave her nothing but misery. Her education was never approved, nor was she. She didn't know who she was anymore. In her youth, she saw herself earning a decent living with the degree she held; a degree that sat on a shelf, filled with the dust of forgotten dreams. It was of no use to ‘someone like her'. To society, this person was a joke. She found others like her, living in the darkness of this, ‘City of Lights'. The job she found was associated with illegal means and the taste of a night life. Work was needed to meet ends, and if the world saw her as nothing but a social pariah, she decided to live with that label; a label that gave her nothing but abuse, pain, and degradation.
The cuts and bruises on her body came together like a distorted map with each road leading to a memory of the worse kind of customer she experienced. The constant shame rang like bells in her head. With the incessant ringing in her head, she got up from the floor and collected the larger pieces of the glass. She approached the broken mirror and tried fitting in whatever piece she could find with some glue. It took her a while to repair the broken mirror, but it still had pieces missing and irreparable cracks. All she saw was her twisted reflection.
Suddenly her eyes caught a glimpse of a photograph dangling helplessly in between the mirror's glass and its hazel colored border. She held the wrinkled photograph, delicately between her fingers. It was a dated photograph of a little boy shielding himself from the summer sun with the help of books. A school bag seemed to weigh his tiny body down, but he still managed to crack a toothy crooked smile in this photograph. The girl recognized this little boy smiles and the brightness in his eyes. She looked into the broken mirror and noticed the brightness had faded away. The sun's rays peeked through the holes of curtain's cloth as dawn approached. The light rays gently touched her back and continued to illuminate her body as she removed her wig and rubbed the mascara smudges from her cheeks. As she continued to stare into the broken mirror, she finally managed to crack the same toothy crooked smile.
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