There’s a man in my Mirror, I know him.

He looks exactly like the one I saw in my dream last night. His skull is crushed and filled with worms and dirt. His teeth are sharp, much like his eyes, which are bleeding. Yet there’s something sharp about his gaze, something beautiful in the way the blood makes his burn red.

What I love more about him is the smile he wears in my dreams. A smile filled with insanity and obsession, as he found something worth destroying himself for.

But tonight he’s crying. His cries are sharp, desparate like someone who want to leave. ‘Stay’, I said.

I cann’t let him leave, what if he returns to my dreams? what if I never see him again? His tears run red with blood, bluring the reflection untill I can see him barely. I try to make him stop, but his rotten flesh keeps falling apart, his skin peeling slowly, cruelly like something desperate to leave.

I reach for the Mirror, but there’s nothing I can do. he keeps crying, and I keep watching, amused and unable to decide if I wanna save him or keep him there forever.

Then I notice something strange.

The Man in the mirror is no longer smilling, I am.

Now the difference is I have that same smile which he has in my dreams by looking at him.

The Man who smiles in My Dreams was originally published in Readers Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When someone hands me more than a single flower, I feel my insides knotting up. With the first thought not being one of joy, rather one of panic. Where is this going and what am I supposed to do with all of it? I feel that it’s a waste, that I’m being given more than I can hold.

The larger the bouquet, the greater the title wave of unease and guilt. A little voice tells me that I do not deserve this, that I will fail to keep them alive, and in return, I have nothing to offer that is even of equal value.

At any time that I find myself on the receiving end of gestures based in affection, I can feel a tightening of my chest. There is something about them that I can feel that I either do not understand or cannot experience in the manner that others appear, at least, to be able to live out.

Something inside pulls away from the gift not in the sense of rejection, but a quiet terror there is no possible way to hold love without letting it slip through my hands and feel as if I have damaged it forever.

This is probably why I flinch from kindness. I have come to see love as a delicate quality that wilts as soon as it enters my hands. What becomes a very generous gift becomes something burdensome for me that I have no idea how to carry.

So I smile. I say thank you. And later, when nobody else is around, I quietly let them die, stowed away somwhere where my heart cannot feel. Because somehow, letting them die seems easier than keeping them alive.

The Bouquet was originally published in Write A Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.