Through the Mirror Clear
By Yasmin M.

Disclaimer: Everything here belongs to me. Mwahahaha!!! Take that, Marvel lawyers! Okay, not really. I alluded to the Psi-War Saga, which of course belongs to Marvel, though it is not directly mentioned. The words "mutie" and "flatscan" belong to Marvel as well, I believe. The Lady of Shalott was written by Lord Tennyson, and quoted without permission (the grave was kinda hard to dig). Foreign Bodies is a novel written by a Singaporean writer, Hwee Hwee Tan.

Rated G.

For most of my life, I was forced to view the world from behind a one-way mirror, to see but not to touch, to keep it at arm's length, to run from the voices.

No more.

You see, I'm a telepath -- insert scary music here. When ordinary people (mere homo sapiens sans superior) think of telepaths, they conjure up images of nasty evil mutants peering into their minds and reading all their nasty evil secrets and blackmailing them and taking away their money and taking away their jobs and lording it over the flatscans.

Pray tell me, why would we want to have their thoughts in our heads?

They don't know how it feels like to hear their thoughts in the day and dream their dreams at night. They don't know how it feels like not to be able to find your own voice among millions of others. They don't know how it feels like to wake up in the morning and think that you've forgotten to put the cat out, only to realize that you don't even have a cat.

They never know, and yet they hate us muties for "cheating". Hah! What wouldn't I give to be one of the losers.

Instead I'm stuck up here in my lonely home in the middle of nowhere, like the Lady of Shalott in her tower. I don't even have a bloody knight to pine after, at that. Books and the radio became my sole companions. I haven't heard another person speak in five years -- the Internet being the only thing that came close to human company. Thank God for telecommuting, or my inheritance would've run out years ago.

All this, because I can't stand the voices any longer. But I hear them anyway, faint whispers in the night when my guard is down.

Is it any wonder I'm an insomniac?

Last night, I slept for a whole night, the first time in eight long years. The migraine and nosebleed had lasted for hours, and even now I still have headaches sometimes. But the silence -- forever, I hope -- is worth it. I can't remember how it was like to be alone in my head, and now I truly am my own person. No more voices. Just me, myself, and I.

But with dawn came the harsh truth: I'm afraid. I'm afraid that it has been too long, that I've lost my identity, that I don't know who I am anymore. It's hard to keep the boat afloat in the middle of a tempest, and I'm afraid that I'm sunk for good.

That's why I'm going away. No, not to my old haunts or my hometown, but somewhere I've never been before. I'm done with my old life, now I've got to build a new one. Brick by brick, if I have to. I want to go to somewhere exotic and far, far away... an odyssey, so to speak, to find my Ithica -- only this Ithica lies in the future and not in the distant past.

Brochures are sitting on my table, waiting patiently for my decision. Now, wherever shall I go? Bali? Hmm. Indonesia. No, things are still tense there. I may be isolated, but I'm not ignorant. Singapore? It's basically one huge city. I've read "Foreign Bodies". Definitely a no. Malaysia? Maybe. China? I've always loved the Great Wall, and I really should see the Three Gorges before the dam gets built. South Africa? Egypt? Choices, choices.

The mirror cracked from side to side.

I don't have to hide behind one any longer. I'm free, and I can't thank enough whoever that was I sensed just before the babble ceased, the one who caused my telepathy to disappear.

There should be a Nobel prize for this.