"I can't stay here forever, man," he said to me.

"You don't have to stay here. Just take the mirror with you."

"What? Like, for the rest of my life? Let's get real."

"Well you can't just murder me!"

"I'm not going to murder you, man. I leave, you leave. I come back, you come back."

"It doesn't work like that."

"What? Why?"

"I don't fucking know, okay? Does it matter?"

"If you don't know why, then you don't know that it'll happen."

I could have choked him if it wasn't for the glass between us. I stormed around what little space existed on my side of the mirror. I kicked a waste bin, and it sailed across the room. Instead of hitting a wall, like it would have on the real side of the mirror, it vanished as soon as it moved out of Real Me's line of sight. That's when I had an idea.

"Alright, look," I said. "Walk straight back, grab your alarm clock, and bring it over here."

With an exhausted look, he did as I asked. My gut flipped when his back turned, but I knew the existence of my world had nothing to do with his vision; what mattered was his point in space. As he returned to the mirror with the clock in hand, on my side the alarm hovered about three feet above the floor and bobbed in unison with its pair. I snatched it out of the air and showed it to him like a magician showing a unopened box of cards to his audience. I leaned to my left and grabbed a bottle of whiteout from the desk by my mirror. I covered the alarm with white paint, showed my artwork to Real Me, and threw the thing as hard as I could into the void.

"Hey!" he yelled. "That was a gift from--"

"Nana...yeah, I know," I said. Then I pointed to the alarm still in his hand, undisturbed and unpainted. "But look. It's still there. Now you do the same. You don't have to break it! Just toss it to the other side of the room. Someplace where I can't see it."

Skeptical, he gently lobbed the alarm clock into a pile of dirty laundry by the door. It was a perfect spot: the laundry was not present in my world.

"Now go get it and bring it back," I said, and I could tell he was about to protest. "Oh my God! Just do it!"

With a groan, he did. In my world, the boundaries began to shift. As he walked to the right, things spawned on my left. Carefully, I kept pace with myself, stepping to the left so as not to disappear with the things on the right. I did the same thing for the return. We met back at the mirror, and I asked to see the alarm clock. He lifted it up, and from behind my back, a doppleganger alarm clock floated before us both. It was clean with no visible signs of white out.

"See!" I said. "Different alarm clock."

"It's the same," Real Me said. "It's just clean now."

"What the fuck?" I shrieked. "Why...why am I such a fucking moron?"

"Look," he said, and placed the alarm back on the nightstand. "I can't keep doing this. It's already nine p.m., and Chick-Fil-A closes in half an hour. And, you know as well as anybody, they aren't open on Sundays. I've been craving--"

"You would kill me for a fucking chicken sandwich?!"

"It's just..." he stammered. "What do you want me to do?"

I felt bad. Of course he couldn't walk around with a mirror his whole life. That was asking for too much. But...but I couldn't just die, could I?

"Can you just...stay with me for a bit?" I asked. "Just for tonight. And then...and then I'll let you go."

With a small hesitation, he sat on the edge of the bed and nodded.

"Thank you," I said. I sat on my own bed and started to cry.