#bts memory

Her room only had her bed, and the mirror. It reached from the floor to the ceiling, it was half as wide as it was tall and it was always sparkling clean. Seen from the door, which was in the middle of the wall, the mirror was on the right side. On the opposite was her bed, then a little cupboard on the back wall.

Her room looked a lot different from the world in the mirror, though. And that had confused her for the longest time, now she was just used to it. Reasoning from what information she had been given by the world in the mirror, she assumed her surroundings to resemble a so-called ‘void’ place. An empty space. Nothingness. The few times she could peek outside she would only see that same ‘void-ish’ purple color plastering the walls. Some goo was running down and piled up in the corners. It was not toxic, it didn’t have a smell or taste, it was just weird to the touch. This was the same room she had stayed in her whole life. She had never changed its interior, she was okay with the order it was placed in. This was her home.

During her teenage years she started wondering where she was and what she was doing. Was this all her life would ever consist of? Would there be nothing exciting, nothing new? On the one hand, it was a very comfortable life. She didn’t have to go outside and actually socialize. She would stay in her room all day and get the exact same food that the mirror would show. She didn’t need to clean, she didn’t need to cook, she didn’t need to do homework, she didn’t need to do anything. The only thing expected of her was to remember.

Remember what the mirror shows.

The mirror showed her the outside world. It was like a game and she was the one watching someone play in first person perspective. She was safe. No matter what happened to the character, she would not be harmed in any way. She felt things. But she was never hurt. The character once broke a leg, but she would be able to stand up from the bed and walk around without any further problems; she had tested it. But why would she not be affected or hurt if she was able to feel the pain?

She was affected by every other emotion that went through her: she would cry when she was sad, she would yell when she was angry, but why would the pain not affect her? It seemed to affect the character. She could see a cast on the leg of the character, she could see that the character was walking in a weird way, she could see how her mirror blurred when the character cried and effectively made her cry at the same time. Pain was the only feeling that would not affect her in the way the character was affected.

But she had given up on questioning her life years ago. That rebellious phase had not lasted long when ultimately all she was given as an answer was that same old sentence; the first thing she remembers.

None of the staff had ever said something different to her. The only voices she had heard apart from the staffs’ voices had all come from the mirror and she didn’t even know any of those people. Sure, she knew their names, since she saw them in the mirror, but she had never really met them, never really touched them, never smelled them.

She could not reach through the mirror, could she?

All she ever knew was the world in the mirror, she knew the character’s life better than her own, because she didn’t know what was happening around her or where she was. She felt connected with the character. The girl in the mirror was the only one remotely close to a friend that she had, even though she also didn’t know her. She knew what the girl looked like, because every day the girl in the mirror would look at herself in other mirrors or reflecting surfaces, but since the mirror only showed the outside world, she had no idea how she herself looked to everybody else; when the character went to sleep, the mirror would show blackness and it was never really reflecting anything. So why was it called a mirror? She had just adapted the name from that one sentence the staff would repeat over and over again when she was as daring as to try to speak to them.

But apart from that same old sentence the staff never spoke to her.  Not when they brought food, not when they cleaned her room or the mirror and not when she asked them something. They told her nothing. Absolutely nothing. She didn’t even know her own name.

After some time she had decided to go with the character’s name, since that was the name she most heard coming from the mirror. She wanted to have that character’s name. It was pretty. And no one would know, since no one talked to her anyways. So it was okay, right? To just take that name and assume it was your own?

Sure, she always wanted to have her own name, but…

It didn’t feel quite right. She felt like she did not have the rights to give herself a name. Well, that was the case for a new name. But the character was always referred to by a name, so it would be alright to just assume the people in the mirror talked to her, right? She didn’t know if her process of thinking made any sense at all, but again, she had no one to talk to, so she decided it would be all right. But why would she then not be able to decide on her own name? Why did nothing in here make any sense?

Her thoughts were unorganized and tumbled into each other, collided, fused into one, parted into two and not even once took a straight path. She thought in mazes and her thinking process was not straight but jumped from one thought to another.

She knew what the character knew. She learned what the character learned, studied what she studied, saw what she saw, felt what she felt, thought what she thought. But despite all this she never felt un-unique. Sure, she had a lot in common with that character in the mirror, but she was still an individual being, right? She had questioned her individuality on multiple occasions, but she could sense it every time she would have decided differently from the character. She remembers that she thought the red dress looked way nicer than the blue one, but the character decided on the blue dress for prom. She was okay with the decision because the character could totally pull that look off, but just with a really quiet voice she uttered:

“That red one would have looked nicer, in my opinion.”

There were not too many occasions when they would come to different decisions, but it happened nonetheless. Sometimes over really trivial things, sometimes over things with a greater influence on what would happen next. For example that one night when the character had an argument with her long-term boyfriend whom she and the character loved dearly, but the character decided it would be best to let him stay the night and let him have sex with her, although she didn’t feel completely consent about it.

“You shouldn’t have done that. You should’ve sent him home,” is what she whispered as soon as she saw that the soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was asleep.

She was an individual. She had her own thoughts too, right? And her own memories. Just… she didn’t have anything to remember. Everything had always only been about the girl in the mirror and not about herself. So the only thing she was actually able to remember… was the girl.

But today was the day all of that would change.

There wasn’t anything off that morning, just a plain, normal, boring day. She was watching the mirror. The girl would soon be off to class and was just now getting ready to wave goodbyes to her family that was hugging her, telling her to take care, to put on some gloves since it was cold outside.

“Bye, Mom and Dad. I love you!”

That was what she always said when she left the house. The girl. And it was now burnt into her memories. If she ever was to leave this room she would probably say the exact same thing, just out of habit. Or out of seeing it being a habit. That’s how connected she felt. And that is also how often she had now heard that. How many times had she seen the exact same things unfold in the mirror? Leaving the house, showering, getting ready for bed or some party, reheating a frozen pizza, playing that stupid candy game on the phone… It never changed.

Same for the train ride. The girl got on, sat in her usual seat, got out her notes from the last language class and checked her homework once more. That girl was a really good student, never complaining, always on time, really smart, good grades, teachers’ pet so they say.

Not that there was anything wrong with it.

It was just… boring.

She didn’t like those boring repetitions happening every single day. There was nothing exciting about what happened in the mirror. She was able to tell what was about to happen before it actually happened, because nothing ever really changed. It was a smooth and steady life that girl was living. Which was a good thing, right?

She also had a steady life. It was comforting in some way to know what would happen next. But then again she had never really experienced something for herself. She was curious. How would it feel to do something for yourself? Would she like it? Would she perhaps make it on her own if she was to step through that mirror? Sure, there was no possibility of getting out, but…

What, if?

It felt like the millionth time now, but she wished again. She wished for something exciting and unpredictable to happen to her.

And she was about to just get what she wanted.

You need to be careful what you wish for – it might become true.

The train had run that tracks so many times already, the always same rhythm had not just once lulled the girl back to slumber. There was the tunnel. Then a forest. A lake.

A stutter.

What? No, that was new. There had never been a stutter in the train’s rhythm. She couldn’t feel it, but she could see the stutter in the way the mirror seemed to shake. The girl was now aware of it as well. She could feel the girl tensing.

Suddenly she was thrown forward. The girl crashed into the people sitting adjacent to her. The mirror went black for a short while. Then it was back. A shriek, then screams resounded through the train car and echoed in her own room. She felt fear and panic. It was apparent in the travelers faces, it was apparent in the way the girl’s hands were shaking.

Then she was thrown back again. There was a horrible cracking sound, like aluminum foil was crumbled, just a thousand times louder and… harder. Glass burst. Screaming, yelling, shrieks and then – nothing.

The mirror was black.

What had happened? She was panting, sweating, she felt her body trembling, she could feel her own fear and a sudden pain crashing her body into pieces. Then her room started shaking. Was it an earthquake? In the void? There was an incredibly loud alarm going off somewhere outside of her room. The shaking didn’t stop. A deep rumble vibrated through the walls, the floor, the ceiling. And this rumble, these vibrations, combined with the shaking…

It was too much.

The mirror cracked in a few places. The resulting sound was horrible, she covered her ears, but she couldn’t avert her gaze from what was happening. The cracks got longer, they covered more space, they ripped the mirror apart.

Her mirror was smashed into a million pieces.

That thing that her whole life had been about. Everything she always knew would never change. That, what she had deemed to be so predictable.

Something unpredictable had happened. Her proof of existence and individuality now laid scattered across the floor, some goo had dropped on the shambles.

“What?”

Her body trembled, the pain was just bearable, her head felt like exploding, she could smell blood, and then she heard the scream. A shockingly shriek scream sounded through everything, drowning out even the alarm that was still going on.

And that made her snap out of the daze, out of the shock.

She smeared the tears away from her cheeks that she didn’t know she had been shedding. She got up, fighting the shaking ground.

“What do I do?”

She didn’t know. The first thing she thought of was to escape. But escape to where? Her head shot up to see the door to her room open, flinging back and forth with the shaking. She was panicking. She didn’t know what was happening around her, or what had happened in the mirror;

the only thing she knew was that her instincts told her to run.

She got up and tried to hold her balance while stumbling towards the door, she held onto the frame, about to step outside for the first time in forever. But suddenly, she didn’t know what she was more afraid of. Was it the unknown in front of her? Or was it the unknown back in her room? Was she more afraid to face the uncertainties that were about to come or was it the fear of what would happen now, since the mirror was beyond repair. She kept looking back, trying to weigh her chances of surviving whatever was happening right now, and although her heart was beating so fast she could feel it reverberating in her fingertips, her ears, her throat, her feet, although she was so scared of stepping outside and leaving what had been her home for all her life…

She needed to run. She knew she needed to run. Her instincts told her.

“Run.”

And so she did.

With a last deep breath she had made her decision. With a determined look in her eyes she set foot away from the room, turned left and started running as fast as she could, fighting the urge to break down and cry, the urge to turn on her heels and pace back into her room and hide under her blanket. She emptied her head. The only thought left was “Run.”

She followed the long hallway and after a few turns ended up in a big hall, full of overthrown chairs and desks, broken machines, sparks falling from the ceiling in a stream and broken pieces of glass everywhere. There was a big screen that all of those machines, desks and chairs seemed to be facing. It took about eighty percent of the wall, only framed on the sides by some more machines.

The screen was black.

She could feel something radiating off of it, though. But she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She shuffled closer, and with every step her fear would decrease. It was a good feeling that enveloped her, it felt warm and comforting, so she came even closer. Then there was a silhouette appearing, slow and steady. She recognized the form of a human being, a head, the upper part of a body. Then the screen brightened so that the figure was revealed.

“I know you,” she said to the screen.

The man in the screen looked confused. He touched his face, he touched his hair, he made exaggerated arm movements. “Guys! Guys, I need your help.” She looked at him, tilting her head slightly. “NOW!” He seemed to be scared of something. His eyes didn’t leave hers even for a second. Then she heard some footsteps on tiles and there were more men appearing.

“I know all of you. I have seen you,” she said.

“Guys, please tell me you see her too.”

She didn’t know if she heard right. Her eyes went big, her mouth fell open in astonishment. Did he see her? And as if she had uttered the question out loud, the other guys agreed: “Yes, we see her. But how is that possible? This is a mirror after all. It should show your reflection, Hoseok. Not the one of a girl,” Yoongi said. She knew them. “Hyung, have you been a girl this whole time and you had just been casting a spell on you so that you looked like you do?” asked Jungkook. She knew them very well. “How is that possible?” Namjoon touched the mirror, his fingers hit the cold reflecting surface and everything seemed normal. “It seems like a normal mirror to me,” he said. “So if that is a normal mirror, where are our reflections?” Taehyung asked. “It’s just her. None of us appears in the mirror,” Jimin had realized as well.

She hadn’t been able to move a muscle. She was dumbfounded, just standing there, blinking and trying to comprehend what was happening. Not a single time had anything in the mirror talked back to her, so how was it possible that the guys in the screen did? She knew them. The girl had been a fan of this group for a while now and had even been on concerts and had met them on fan signs. That was something both agreed on, those guys were incredibly talented and dedicated.

A crack made her look behind her in terror. Only now she was back to the emergency situation unfolding right in front of her; not just in the mirror. This time she could see it for real. With her own eyes, in her own perspective. She didn’t know what else to do, so she followed the comforting feeling, stepped closer to the screen and touched it. What was there to be afraid of if the feeling radiating from that place was so welcoming?

And that is when the screen lit up, everything went white, she quickly closed her eyes, the shaking and the rumbling decreased slowly, there was no more alarm, only the shrieking scream resounding in her head.

Then – silence.

She could only feel her heart beating fast and her breath rushing in and out of her lungs. She could feel a drop of sweat running down the side of her face, she could feel that the floor was cold under her socketed feet. There was no gooey smell. There was instead something musky. And a ticking clock from somewhere. She didn’t dare to open her eyes. She knew that she was not in her voidish place anymore. She took a step back, and hit a wall and something that was hanging off of it. She squealed.

The feeling of a hand on her cheek made her open her eyes in an instant.

And she was met with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen in the mirror. Full of color, a worried expression, an excited beam emanating from them. And she knew exactly whose eyes that were.

“Jung Hoseok.”

His thumb wiped away a tear that had escaped.

“How do you know my name? Who are you? Why did I see you in the mirror?” he asked.

“And how did you get out of it right into our apartment?” Namjoon asked. She kept looking at Hoseok for another moment before finally turning to Namjoon; and then she finally realized that she was indeed standing in front of the seven men, in the hallway of their apartment.