The mirror I broke and never replaced
Last winter, I cracked the bathroom mirror above the sink in my North Melbourne flat. The job began with a eucalyptus sprig and ended when the suction cup released with a soft, deceptive pop. A line appeared first, then another, branching around my reflection like a map of a river I had never seen. The mirror remained usable, which was somehow the cruelest part.
I left it exactly as it was. For months, I washed my face beneath the fracture, brushed my teeth while one eye floated in a separate pane, and checked the time through a web of fine cracks. The mirror I broke and never replaced became a private barometer: whenever I felt unmoored, I looked at the face returning to me and saw it already divided.
The object became a way into larger questions: which belongings we keep after they disturb us, what meanings we attach to them, and how readily we turn personal damage into a story about ourselves. A broken mirror offered me a rare starting point, an incident small enough to remember and large enough to carry.
The night the glass gave way
The crack happened on a Sunday while I was trying to make the flat feel less temporary. I had bought the eucalyptus sprig at a Brunswick market, along with oranges in a net bag and a book with a cracked spine. For a moment, the mirror had shown the version of me who organised small domestic things. Then my wrist caught the frame, and that self-confidence travelled down the wall in glass.
For days, I considered covering it with paper, masking it with toothpaste, or taking it down and carrying it to the recycling bay behind the flats, where bins waited beside a tagged-off loading zone. None of those options required buying anything, which appealed to me. Repair had become easier to postpone than replacement, because postponement asked no questions.
A face divided by a line
Every morning, the fracture selected a different feature. On bad days it cut through the mouth; on calmer ones it made a pale seam beside my cheek. I realised I was no longer seeing my face but editing it, deciding which side belonged to the person I wanted to be. The old glass had once been a neutral witness. Now it had become an accomplice in my self-criticism.
A friend asked whether I wanted to replace it. I said it suited me, though we both knew that was a defence rather than an answer. The longer I kept it, the more I noticed how people narrate damage. I kept thinking about brokenness and stories, and how a break can reveal the hidden joinery of a life rather than cancel the whole structure.
The empty hook
At Bunnings, I walked through the bathroom aisle with a tape measure in my hand. Mirrors hung under bright lights, each one clean, square and ready to return a flattering answer. A timber-frame option cost less than I expected. I lifted its box, felt its reassuring weight, and put it back. The transaction would have taken five minutes; the decision had taken months.
I even visited an Adelaide Central Market stall where secondhand mirrors leaned against racks between ceramic bowls and old bread bins. A narrow, spotted glass had a shape I liked, but buying it felt like changing the evidence. So I left with a bag of coffee beans instead and let the broken mirror remain the only one with a history I could not revise.
What family could see
My mother noticed during a visit from Newcastle. She arrived with a casserole, as she does, and stood in the bathroom doorway until I turned on the light. “You could have a new one there tomorrow,” she said, not unkindly. I heard concern in her voice and irritation in my own. I wanted a mirror, not another person to manage.
That irritation belonged to a longer pattern in my relationships: when someone offered a practical solution, I tested whether they would press until I accepted it. The mirror gave me a clean miniature version of the same impulse. Keep the problem visible, control the terms, and wait for the other person to leave. A chipped basin can carry more blame than a person should.
Turning damage into material
I started writing in a notebook kept beside the kettle. First came facts: the eucalyptus sprig, the pop of the suction cup, the North Melbourne laneway, the way the crack caught bathroom light. Then came interpretations, which I distrust when they arrive too quickly. I circled the obvious metaphor and left room for a less tidy one: maybe the mirror was doing exactly what glass does.
This mattered because making something from damage should not beautify the damage too quickly. The essays on poetry and feeling reminded me that useful creative work can hold contradiction without resolving it for the writer’s convenience. I wanted the fracture to remain visible and the person living with it to remain more than the damage.
Living with the fracture
Eventually, I moved the mirror from above the sink to a leaning shelf in the hallway. There, it catches the front door and the narrow stripe of courtyard light. It is still a bathroom mirror, repurposed, but no longer the place where I interrogate my appearance. Objects gain meaning through use as much as memory; sometimes relocation is a kind of repair.
I have not replaced it, and I no longer describe that as refusal. Keeping something broken does not mean praising destruction or romanticising harm. It can mean refusing to let the most dramatic moment dictate every later day. The crack is part of the room now, but it is not the whole room. Neither am I only the person who broke it.
If you have ever kept an object because replacing it felt impossible, give that story a page. Describe the object precisely, then follow its meanings through the rooms and relationships it has touched. Good personal writing begins where certainty ends.
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