The Mirror Remembers: Stories from the Cracks
By Melanie Paquette
I’ve been struggling to write this article. None of the ideas I had seemed interesting. Usually, something makes itself known if I wait for it. But not this time. I felt stuck. It’s incongruent to me to be stuck at Beltane — a time when everything is bursting forth, growing. It’s Beltane, and yet I feel like I’m stuck in Samhain. Caught in the tide between the two opposite points of the year. I told a friend about feeling stuck, and she said, “Maybe you should just tell a story.”
So, I have a story for you. Perhaps, in reading this story, you’ll find answers you may have been seeking.
A few months ago, I bought a mirror. I make jewelry and sometimes attend markets. People who stop by my booth have asked if I have a mirror so they can see how a piece looks on them, and until now I haven’t had one. So I found one that seemed to match the aesthetic of my jewelry and wasn’t too expensive, and I ordered it online.
It arrived when my mother was in the hospital. During that time, nothing happened that wasn’t work, being with mom, or getting a little sleep. It’s like I pressed some sort of cosmic pause button on anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. So the mirror remained unopened.
Mom died on a Thursday morning, the last Thursday in March. One month less a day from the day I’m writing this. She was surrounded by family — there was barely enough space for all of us in the room. Afterwards, I spent a couple weeks with my dad and sister, helping with paperwork and sorting through some of mom’s many treasures. Then I came home, and the cosmic pause button released, and I started opening the pile of mail and all the packages that had arrived in the previous 2 months.
I opened the mirror last week. It’s a double sided mirror — the kind that rotates on a stand. I assembled it and found a crack on one side, near the bottom.
It’s always disappointing to receive something broken, and since I had waited so long to open it, I missed the return window. But, the mirror is beautiful, and the crack is fairly small — it’s completely usable.
I think of Leonard Cohen’s iconic words …
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
So I put it away to bring with me to the next market I attend.
Days passed. I went back to work. And for some reason, I kept thinking about this cracked mirror. So, while I sat writing this article, an hour away from the deadline, I took the mirror out of the box and put it in front of me. I took a moment to polish the fingerprints from the glass. I lit a candle — a favourite scent — and instantly knew it wasn't the right one. I blew it out and sought out another. The Storyteller. That’s the one.
I looked at myself in the mirror. The side with the crack. Then I looked at the mirror. I wondered about her story. And whether the stories of all mirrors are connected somehow.
And I remembered stories. How vampires have no reflection in a mirror, presumably because they have no soul. How breaking a mirror is supposed to be followed by seven years of bad luck. The mirror reflects the soul — breaking the mirror damages the soul and back luck follows. I remembered how my dad broke a mirror when I was a kid, and my mother always said that he had nothing but good luck after breaking that mirror. I remembered a mirror that hung in our house, a big mirror with the type of frame that was popular in the 70s. The glass had a big crack in it. I don’t remember how it got the crack. I remembered that instead of throwing it away, my mom used markers to turn the crack into a branch with flower blossoms and birds. I wondered where that mirror is now. I remembered fairy tales with magic mirrors and Alice going through the looking glass and how mirrors are portals to other worlds.
And randomly, I remembered the lines from the Walrus and the Carpenter — a piece of a poem I’ve kept in memory since I was 12 — around the time my mother gave me my first deck of tarot cards …
‘The time has come,' the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
And then I asked the mirror if she would share a story with me. And in response, she whispered “I already did.”
Hey, I'm Melanie. I read cards and host workshops here at Ninth Wave Arts, and I make magic. Specifically, I make the kind of magic that you can wear every day and that serves as a reminder to step back from the daily nonsense and remember that you are amazing, magical even. I was born on Halloween — magic has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
