I have never questioned it before because no one has told me to question it before. It has always been perfect.

Exact, precise, nothing out of the ordinary. It has never given me a reason to distrust it. I have never before felt this anxiety, this paranoid fear for something that, on paper, sounds so juvenile.

But now I do question it. I have begun questioning everything—and the process is exhausting. She won't tell me anything yet.

I can see her smirk out of the corner of my eye as she mimics everything so well in front of others, and in front of me sometimes. It is like she is trying to make me go insane now that I know to question. To wonder.

To ask who is in my mirror. Because I know, that the girl that I see in the camera, in reflections, in the mirror in my bathroom is not me. She has never been me.

***

It started at the beginning of my life when I was starting to learn colors. I remember it in a vivid haze.
I was coming home from kindergarten, with a worksheet to do at home to practice our vocabulary.

One of the questions was what was the color of my eyes. I didn't know at first though, so I skipped to the bathroom mirror to check. I saw that my eyes were brown, so I wrote that down.

And the next day, when the teacher was grading the papers during playtime, she called me over and asked me what was 'brown' to me. Confused, I pointed to her mahogany desk. Her expression changed and she showed me what I wrote for the paper, and she asked me why I wrote brown because my eyes were blue. She pointed to the sky outside the window nearby, and back to my eyes, and told me that my eyes were blue. Even more, confused now, I tried to explain that I saw my eyes as brown as the desk in the mirror.
I have brown eyes.

She sent me away, and I spent the rest of the day trying to catch my reflection with blue eyes, and I always saw brown.

I am sure now, that the teacher wrote me off as trying to lie my way through the assignment instead of checking a mirror.
I didn't ask my friends about the color, because I didn't want them to think I was too dumb or lazy to check in a mirror.

***

I have always seen my eyes as brown in any reflection unless someone is staring at me and my reflection.

I first noticed this inconsistency when I was in early middle school, and I was asking what eyeshadow I should wear that would look best with my eyes.
We were in the bathroom, and I was washing my hands. And my friend noted from somewhere behind me that with my blue eyes, a silver or lighter-toned color would work. She looked at my reflection with me, and when I looked back at it, it seemed off.
Only when my friend had already left did I realize that my eyes were blue in this false reflection.

***

These types of things have happened all the time to me, but as I had gotten older they seemed more extreme and more frequent. One time I only saw that I had very light blonde hair in the mirror for a couple of weeks, even though I hadn't dyed my hair and my normal color was a dirty blonde.

I have done the fingertip test, and I can assure you that these were all real mirrors. Nothing behind them.

And yet, there was someone. Someone that wanted me to go mad at this point but I am far more resilient than they think.

***

Kids adapt, you know. I thought that everyone had unpredictable reflections.

Surely, everyone had a different person in the mirror.

This sight is real—I swear it! It can't be real! I have seen it for so long now, if I were insane, surely I would know it by now!

Surely I would be seeing demons under my bed and jellyfish floating in the skies!

It has to be real.

It has to, right? I'm not insane.