It was raining the day I first saw her. I was standing in the cold, staring at the reflections in a shop window. The raindrops were falling from my hair into my eyes, and my drenched t-shirt clung to my shoulders and back. Faintly, I remember thinking that I should have found some shelter from the rain, but despite this, I never moved. It was so, so cold.

Now you may think that could have been some warning, pathetic fallacy or maybe even irony, but me, I just thought it was bad luck. It seemed, unluckily, that my life was to be lived in a constant state of wariness, and I really didn’t mind at first. Yet, after a while, it starts to irk…

I was pretty normal until high-school. Honestly, I was pretty good-looking, girls liked me and I generally managed to maintain good grades, not that I’m trying to brag. My parents were proud of me, and life for me was pretty good.

One day I took a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Just out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at my reflection. But looking back at me was not the face I knew so well. Instead of my usual pale, teenage face, a man in his forties was staring back at me. Almost glaring.

Complete and utter shock is the only way to describe the way I felt in that moment. My first reaction, almost a reflex, was to splash water in my face and shake my head. Like the other face would fall out of my mind. This obviously did not work, and all I could do was gaze at the other face.

He was replacing me in the mirror. When I moved he moved. He opened his mouth, appearing to speak when I spoke.

I was going mad. I knew it. And I threw up in the sink.

Complete disgust.

It may not seem like such an issue, seeing faces in a mirror. But it was driving me mad. I couldn’t stand it.

The worst thing was I couldn’t tell anybody. Because I didn’t want other people to know I was crazy. So I kept silent and tried to pretend I was fine. How did I cope with my insanity? Well… I blocked people out. I shut my friends out of my life and began to ignore my parents. I ate alone at school. And sat alone in lessons. I stopped going out, and kept myself indoors. All the while, I looked for a solution.

But no matter where I looked, I could find no answers. My research started out using the internet, yet it seemed no-one else had gone through the same thing as me. I was a completely new case. So, I continued my existence this way.

And I stopped looking in mirrors, however I couldn’t stop myself occasionally glancing into a window by accident, so I still noticed how the faces changed every so often. Sometimes I would see old men, with bald heads and no teeth. Sometimes teenagers, with gawky, skinny faces. But they were always the same height as me and exactly replaced me wherever I was looking.

I hated my life. And myself. For being this way.

Of course, this all ended the day I met her.