In a slippery development out of Cambridge, MA, Maddie Toland, who was doing her makeup, is now caressing her own cheek, gazing into her own eyes, and wondering how she’s really in there.
Whoops! It happens to the best of us.
“That is me,” says Maddie, examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “But what does that even mean?”
“I will only ever know my own consciousness, my own perspective; I will be in this body and mind — the only one I’ve ever known — unceasingly for all my time on Earth,” Maddie adds. “Do I have a soul? Where do my thoughts come from?”
Okay, yikes. We need to get this girl out of the bathroom and watching some mindless television ASAP.
“If you really look at your irises, it’s like, what the fuck,” Maddie says, bringing her half-made-up face inches from the mirror. “And I’ll never be able to see myself. There are photographs and the reversed image of reflection, but I will never ever be able to actually look directly at my face with my own two eyes. I am at once the only person I’ll ever truly know, and a permanent stranger.”
Witnesses confirm that Maddie is in it right now.
“Yeah, I walked by the bathroom and saw her patting her own face, then sort of pawing at her reflection,” says Maddie’s roommate, Hannah Goldman. “I asked if she was high and she just said, ‘I don’t think so’.”
“Anyway, I hope this wraps up soon because I need to get in the shower.”
As far as we know, Maddie is still pondering the mysteries of reality and personhood, but we can’t say for sure because we left when she started asking us questions about the afterlife.
