Reflection

As I stared at the blob in front of me, the blob stared back.

“So…?” Emuru asks with a grin on her face, “what do you think?”

I didn’t know what to say. Not only did I look like a blob, but I didn’t look like anything Emuru had described me as yesterday.

Where was my long hair? Where were my girlish clothes? Do some blobs have a more feminine face than others? Countless questions ran through my mind as I turned to look at Emuru.

“I… look like a blob,” I said.

“A blob?” she asked, surprised as she pushes the mirror down and examines my face closely, “well that’s a bit harsh isn’t it? Sure your hair is a little messy, but I wouldn’t call you a blob. Have a little more faith in yourself.”

I scratched my head. She was seeing something that I couldn’t see. Maybe I did look like a girl, and it was just that this ‘mirror’ thing blobified everything it reflected, but as far as I could tell, I was a blob—just like everyone else.

Everyone except her of course.

Curious, I looked around at the blobs gathering mingling around the area, and asked her “what does everyone else look like to you?”

For a moment, she seems taken aback by the question but she manages to answer, “well… that old man over there is wearing a brown plaid shirt and a beret, and that black haired lady is wearing a blue dress and sunglasses.”

I look over to where she points as she describes each and every blob in such detail that it made me want to believe she wasn’t making it up on the spot.

“They don’t look like blobs to you?” I ask, interrupting her.

“Blobs?”

“All I see are blobs; that’s what everyone looks like to me.”

“...do I  look like a blob to you?”

I paused and looked at her.

“No, you look pretty, unlike everyone else here… You look like what I thought I’d look like.”

She makes a weird expression—the same, undecipherable one she made yesterday.

“I see…” she said, her voice a little shaky as she recomposed herself, “then can you tell me what I look like to you?”

I stared her up and down and replied, “you have a short, messy ponytail and you’re wearing a sweater with a long midi skirt. You have an earring on your right ear, and your face is very, very, pretty.”

She lets out a snort.

“And that’s it?” she asks.

“What else is there?”

“What about their colors?”

“Colors?”

“Yeah, I noticed that you didn’t seem to say what color they were…”

“Well… they’re all yellow,” I replied.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

She thinks for a moment.

“Are you perhaps… colorblind?”

“Colorblind…? Maybe… The only colors I see are black, white, gray, blue, and yellow and I haven’t seen any other color, so perhaps I am.”

“I don’t think that’s what colorblind means…” she murmurs, “probably anyway…”

She then looks at me and says, “so you’re only able to see less than half the color spectrum and you can only see other people including yourself, as blobs, with the only exception being me?”

I nodded.

“How does that work?” she asked.

“I’m not too sure myself,” I replied, “until I met you the day before yesterday, the only colors I saw were black and white. You caught my attention because you were the first sign of blue in my world. You know… you looked like a blob at first too, but when I kept staring at you, you started to look less and less like one.”

She stares at me blankly in confusion.

“And to think I’ve met someone like you before…” she murmured, “but the more you keep talking, the more different you seem from them…”

She then scoots up in front of my face, and spreads my eyes open, staring straight into them as if examining them for a disease.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Just checking for a parasite or something.”

“Well… is there one?”

She leans back and laughs a little.

“No, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was,” she said, “anyway, the bus is almost here, so I have to go for now. I’ll let you keep this mirror so you can hopefully figure something out.”

I turned to see the bus suddenly appear from the corner of my eye and park right in front of where a bunch of blobs were waiting next to us. As she stands up to gather with them, she gives me a wave—something that I remembered that meant ‘goodbye’, and I decided to wave back at her.

When the bus disappears from my sight, I look back at the mirror, staring at the blob that reflected back at me.

There’s no way this thing reflects what I actually look like, I thought, Emuru says I have long hair and a feminine face, but then again she described every other blob in such detail too… Maybe she’s just very good at describing blobs.

I shook my head.

No, that can’t be right, she had to be really good at making stuff up to describe everyone so easily like that. Maybe I’m the one who’s in the wrong here… Come to think of it, Emuru used to look like a blob too until I decided to look closer, and the longer I look at certain blobs, the more detail I see… perhaps I just need to look at myself a little longer in the mirror.

Giving it a second go, I closed my eyes for a few seconds before staring at myself in the mirror. As I look at my reflection, I slowly begin to see it change and become more detailed as I watch my blob-like form slowly become more like what Emuru described.

Long tangled hair began to sprout from my head, and a feminine face began to take shape, and as I angled the mirror downwards, I noticed that I was in fact wearing clothes—a large hoodie and a pair of jeans. Despite all of these changes happening in the mirror, I felt nothing physically change within myself, implying that the mirror, or rather, my vision was lying to me the whole time.

So Emuru was telling the truth, I thought, I really am a girl… not that I really know what that means, but it's good to know I'm not a blob.

I angled the mirror back up to my face and saw that I was smiling, and upon noticing it, the hue of my body begins to change to yellow.

I am… yellow? I thought, which means I’m happy…? Yes, I’m happy… I’m happy!

My smile grows wider and wider and the hue of my body becomes more and more yellow as I happily look at the mirror in my hands—the mirror given to me by Emuru.

Ever since I had met her, the world around me had changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined before. There were more colors now, and things that I didn’t know existed in this world like the bus and the mirror began to appear one by one as she showed these things to me. It was as if the world was slowly becoming more and more like the world I used to live in.

I looked up from the mirror, staring into the sea of blobs that mingled about in the endless white canvas around me.

I want to see Emuru again, I thought, I wonder how many more things she can show me.

As I stood up to make my way back home however, I suddenly felt my body stop.

Huh…?  I wondered, what’s going on…?