Stranger In The Mirror Of My Life

Before me is a mirror
A mirror beside my bed
Away from the sun burning brightly
Outside the window’s blinds in my darksome room

For a moment
Before the mirror
I stand to see the face of the victim
Whose result returned a death sentence
After a test
And another test and yet another
But they kept coming back
One and the same
Like the torrent of tears that keep returning to your eyes
When the heart remains wet with worries

Wavering worries of one’s life walking away from the door,
As the wall clock ticks unrestrained,
Untouched, unconcerned,
Like the footsteps of the world around you moving on,
Unaffected, unmoved, unstirred.

In the mirror
I found a face
A certain face too afraid to look at me.
The face of a stranger –
A strange face sketched in the shadows of my unlit room
Against the fiery fingers of the sun
Flicking the window’s blinds on a fateful morning
To irradiate my day

I know this face hiding in the mirror isn’t me –
It couldn’t be me!
I look straight into her eyes,
It was then she looked back at me –
Petrified, she crept back into the closet of her life.

I walk slowly and gently towards her,
Suddenly the stranger steps closer and closer towards me.
And when my feet froze on the floor
Upon the freezing fear that gripped me,
The stranger in the mirror startles –
Faint-hearted, intimidated

This stranger is not me
No, not me!
She is just a shadow –
The shadow of someone too locked-up in her closet to open up to me.
She is a stranger too steeped in shame to stand up to herself
And say:

“I’m Hannah,
I’m HIV positive –
How beautiful life could be
When I open the window’s blinds in my heart
And let the rays of the sun
Overshadow the stranger in the mirror of my life.”