You Have to Laugh

Still, you have to laugh, don't you?

At least until it dawns upon you that it is indeed yourself that is staring back incredulously from that mirror. Then, you either have to carry on laughing, or start to cry.

No, I don't know what happened either.

One day, it seemed, you were young and... well, if not entirely beautiful, at least the fearful villagers didn't march with flaming torches en-mass to the castle of your creator demanding an end to the abomination.

Then suddenly, it seems only a short while later, you have turned into this... this creature that stares back at you from what obviously must be one of those funfair mirrors that someone has put here as some form of practical joke.

Yes, there is a practical joke, but it is not the mirror.

It is life itself that is the joker playing its cruel tricks of time upon everyone. It is time that is lurking there behind the ajar door giggling at your discomfiture as you despair at the disparity between what you hoped, assumed, you were and the cold reality of that reflection.

It is the weight of those sniggering years that have taken what was once young and firm and turned it into the failed creature that stares forlornly back at you, waiting to be put out of its misery, but you must learn to live with it because the alternative seems much worse... and then, you realise that you were right to laugh in the first place, after all.