Alone

Some mysteriously selected memory can remain in one's thoughts forever.

Now middled-aged, Jerry still recalls the puzzling sight while walking down busy Broadway. His mom's hand pulling them along, Jerry must have been five or six. The Los Angeles morning sun already warming the sidewalks by ten, he'd often see the "mirror man."

Probably some kind of European, as most immigrants were in the post-war  forties and fifties, he was a small man, neatly dressed in gray suit, white shirt. He always held in his palm a round mirror, and constantly spoke directly into it as he walked. His speech would become very excited, conversing with his mirror as if another person, usually in German, sometimes heavy accent but fluent English.

The man would sometimes laugh, other times seem to argue, always  intensely engaged, self-absorbed. Jerry noticed how the man talked continuously, seeming to not even pause to breath, holding his mirror close, never glancing left or right.

One day, this man with his mirror stood beside Jerry at a corner red light, not noticing the boy at all, or anyone else. As the man walked briskly ahead, Jerry asked his mom. "He's sick, don't stare.", she said, giving no more clues.

The boy, his family also immigrants, didn't have the words or knowledge at that age, but Jerry knew he was looking at some kind of hurt, injury, some untold war story of grief and loss. Folks on the street cruelly chuckled at the man's peculiar and narcissistic routine.

But Jerry, a sensitive lad, felt only a momentary twinge in his gut, an empathic shudder, a reflex he couldn't name. In the darkest depths of detachment from the world, solitary dialogues self-contained, the barely temporary relief from some constant, monstrous stress- or else some returning gloom becomes the voice of menace, so that a small, round mirror becomes a horribly frightening solution to being utterly alone.