🪞 The Mirror of Tomorrow

Chapter 1 – The Flea Market

Saturday was supposed to be an ordinary day. Maxime had made no particular plans. His small two-room apartment, with its faded paint and suffocating air, felt too narrow to contain his thoughts. So, he went out for a walk, as he often did when everything weighed too heavily on him. In the neighborhood square, a flea market was in full swing. Stalls were piled with worn vinyl records and books with frayed covers. Vendors’ shouts mingled with the laughter of children. Maxime wandered aimlessly among them. He rarely bought anything. But that day, an object stopped him in his tracks. At the back of a dusty stand, wedged between a rickety wardrobe and a broken lamp, stood an old mirror. Its carved wooden frame was decorated with faded flowers and frozen birds. A small handwritten tag hung from the corner: “Mirror of Tomorrow. Look closely.” Maxime gave a short laugh. Another seller trying to give an air of mystery to an old piece. But something in the phrase intrigued him. He leaned closer. His breath caught. The reflection was not quite his own. Of course, it was his face—but altered, twisted by a strange weariness. The features drawn, skin dull, deep circles under the eyes. And above all, that empty, lifeless gaze, as if he had already given up. Maxime recoiled sharply, heart racing. He rubbed his eyes, leaned in again. The same image stared back at him. “You alright, young man?” asked the vendor, an old man in a cap. “Yes… yes, I’m fine,” Maxime stammered. He bought the mirror without really knowing why and carried it home.

Chapter 2 – The Anxiety

The mirror now stood in his living room, propped against a wall. Maxime couldn’t tear himself away from it. He looked again and again, hoping the image would go back to normal. But it didn’t. That weary, drained face remained. When night fell, he barely slept. His thoughts kept circling. What if the mirror really showed the future? What if, in a year’s time, I became that person? The next day, at a café with a friend, he tried to brush it off. But the conversation circled back to his unease. “Honestly, Max, you’ve got to stop believing what other people say about you,” his friend Thomas told him. “You’re not lazy, you’re not lost. You’re just in the middle of choosing who you want to become.” The words struck him. They tied themselves to the mirror. You’re not the person others talk about. You’re the one you choose to be. That evening, he came home, switched on the light, and looked into the mirror again. The reflection didn’t change. Still that lifeless version of himself.

Chapter 3 – The First Step

That Monday, at work, Maxime tried something different. Usually silent and withdrawn, he forced himself to smile at a colleague, then started a conversation. Nothing revolutionary, but a small victory. That evening, he went back to the mirror. The reflection had changed. Subtly, but unmistakably. The eyes were no longer completely hollow. A faint spark had returned. A shiver ran down his spine. The mirror wasn’t showing who he was. It was showing who he was becoming.

Chapter 4 – The Daily Test

The following weeks were strange. Maxime turned into the guinea pig of his own experiment. When he woke up early, went running despite the rain, or wrote a few pages of the novel he had abandoned, the mirror rewarded his efforts: his reflection looked brighter, stood straighter, even smiled at times. But when he fell back into old habits—procrastination, hours lost on social media, criticizing himself endlessly—the mirror punished him. His double became heavier, darker. He soon realized that his thoughts carried as much weight as his actions. One day, after brooding over old grudges for hours, he saw that the mirror’s glow had faded again.

Chapter 5 – The Resistance

One evening, Maxime received an email. A cultural association was looking for a volunteer coordinator for a local project. Exactly the kind of mission he had once dreamed of. But he hesitated. Fear of rejection, the nagging sense he wasn’t good enough, the lure of staying in his comfort zone. He stood in front of the mirror. The reflection was bleak, almost sad. He drew a deep breath, opened his laptop, and drafted an application email. His hand trembled as he hit “Send.” When he looked up, his reflection… was smiling. A real smile. Maxime understood. The mirror didn’t reward ease. It rewarded courage.

Chapter 6 – The Transformation

Months went by. Maxime adopted new habits: running three times a week, writing daily, saying “yes” to opportunities that scared him a little. The mirror changed less, because he needed it less. He felt the difference within himself. His colleagues remarked on his newfound confidence. His mother noticed that he spoke with enthusiasm again, like he used to. One evening, after a long day, he placed his hand on the mirror. The glass vibrated beneath his palm. His reflection was now identical to him. Not tired, not hollow. Simply himself, in the present. The mirror glowed softly one last time, then became an ordinary object again.

Chapter 7 – The Man of Tomorrow

A year later, Maxime stood in his bathroom, facing an ordinary mirror on the wall. He looked at himself. He recognized the man he had built, day after day. More confident, more aligned, more alive. And in his mind, the phrase that had haunted him since that day at the flea market came back one last time: “Be the person you want to be a year from now, and act like that person today. The self you already are will thank you tomorrow.”

Maxime smiled. His future was no longer something to fear. It was a choice.