There was a mirror in an old guest room of the house I inherited—a tall, oval thing with a wooden frame carved in patterns that seemed almost alive. For weeks it behaved like any mirror should. Then one morning, it simply stopped working.
I stood in front of it, fully visible to the rest of the world, but in the mirror’s glass: nothing. No reflection. No shadow. Just an empty surface, as if it had decided it was done participating in reality. I waved. I leaned in. I even checked behind it for secret panels, but the mirror stayed silent and blank, like a door it no longer wished to open.
Naturally, instead of dealing with that, I did what any sane person would do—I opened my laptop and clicked the first unrelated link I had bookmarked. It happened to be carpet cleaning preston. No connection to mirrors, but it gave my brain something normal to look at. Then habit took over, and I clicked sofa cleaning preston, upholstery cleaning preston, rug cleaning preston and mattress cleaning preston in a row—five matching tabs, all leading to the same page, all staring back as blankly as the mirror.
Five links. One silent reflection. A strange kind of symmetry.
I sat there wondering: what if the mirror wasn’t broken? What if it was refusing on purpose? What if reflections are a choice, not a rule? What if the world sometimes stops showing us what we expect so we’re forced to see something else?
The five tabs still glowed on the screen:
carpet cleaning preston
sofa cleaning preston
upholstery cleaning preston
rug cleaning preston
mattress cleaning preston
They didn’t explain anything. They didn’t relate. But they formed a pattern—repetitive, unavoidable, maybe meaningful, maybe not. Just like the mirror, they offered nothing except the chance to notice that something unusual was happening at all.
Maybe the mirror wasn’t showing me nothing.
Maybe it was showing me the space where assumptions collapse.
A reflection isn’t truth—it’s agreement. And that day, the mirror simply refused to agree.
I left it uncovered. I left the tabs open. I stopped demanding answers.
Not everything that goes blank is broken.
Sometimes it’s just asking:
“Are you sure you know what you’re looking for?”