MIRROR MIRROR BY SHREYA RAJAPPA @SHREYARAJAPPA A high school student living in sunny California, Shreya Rajappa enjoys writing creative non-fiction and impassioned Op-Ed articles. She credits her intersectional identity as a bisexual, feminist young woman with Indian and Sri Lankan parents for her desire to become involved in journalism to represent others who share aspects of her identity and to bring awareness to social issues involving marginalized communities. In her free time, she watches movies, takes pictures, tie-dyes clothes, and plays basketball.
Nine Years Ago Eyes squinted, knees bent on the soft, thick, white duvet below me, I peer into the clear mirror at the reflection of my eyes. From this angle, in this lighting, due to a combination of delusion, wanton hope, and deep desire, my eyes look green. My eyes are not green. They are so brown that they’re black. Black as the sea at mid-
night. Black as obsidian rock, forged from volcanic magma underground and smooth as glass. Black as the heart of the cruelest villain. Black as my fringed hair, lobbed off at the shoulders and swishing against my neck. Nevertheless, right now, they look green and I’m happy, happy because my eyes are pretty now, soft, colored, filled with light that normally gets sucked in and extinguished by my dark abysses. Finally, my eyes are a color in the rainbow, bright and clear—something that’s celebrated in the South Asian community. India is infatuated with light, colored eyes—a token of beauty according to their society, as rare as those may be. My eyes sting. I haven’t blinked
since I noticed the false greenness of my eyes, a discovery of fiction. They begin to water. I’m forced to squeeze my eyes shut, letting them recover from the strain my excitement burdened them with. I quickly reopen my eyes, praying that the hint of green is still there, but as the stinging subsides so does the green coloring. Even though I squint my eyes again, wildly searching my reflection for it, I’m back to reality, my eyes back to their deep, darkerthan-mud, boring brownness. The corners of my mouth tug my face into a frown, the top lip brown and the bottom a soft pink, an idiosyncrasy around Canadian white people with two pink lips each. Seven Years Ago Pencil grazing the stark white paper, a dark grey mark is left behind in its wake. In the middle of the outline of a face
