Before this story found its voice, it lived for a time inside someone else’s dream.
Carnival Land was a luminous and enigmatic graphic novel created by an artist I loved. In its dreamlike world, she imagined herself as a heroine of transformation, poised to step through the Mirror of Selves into a perfected image of who she might become. Alongside her stood Peri, an acrobat who offered her shelter and quiet loyalty while she stitched her new self into being. That character was drawn from me. I had been written into Carnival Land not as a partner, but as a supporting character, one who would steady the mirror as she crossed the threshold alone.
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Bricolage illustration from the graphic novel Carnival Land (2011), incorporating a photographed image of the author posed as the character “Peri.” The work was gifted to the author.
At the time, I didn’t fully recognise the deeper currents beneath that dream. But as our relationship unfolded, we became enmeshed in unconscious patterns that mirrored the roles from Carnival Land. I found myself becoming what I had been drawn as: a container for someone else’s metamorphosis. Her quest for perfection, for self-creation, left little room between us for shared reality.
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Bricolage illustration from the graphic novel Carnival Land (2011), incorporating a photographed image of the author posed as the character “Peri.” The work was gifted to the author.
In writing The Mirror Made of Bone, I found myself turning the glass inward, revealing an older current, a shape formed in childhood. A deep attunement to the pain of others. A longing to mend what was broken. An instinct to quiet myself, to tread lightly, to disappear so as not to add to the weight already carried.
The Mirror Made of Bone is a way of making sense, of re-entering the dream and speaking from within it in my own voice. It’s a story about what it means to become a symbol in someone else’s search for wholeness. It’s about the subtle cost of projection, and the strength it takes to see clearly when the spell begins to dissolve.
This tale is offered in wonder
for what was revealed,
for what remained hidden,
and for the love that lives, even in silence.
— Nicholas Monks
Dedication
In remembrance of Carnival Land
and the weaver of costumes
Epigraph
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lay of Leithian (from The Silmarillion)
THE MIRROR MADE OF BONE
Once, in a half-lit kingdom where dusk and dawn blurred, there lived a dreamer named Tinuviel. Her smile curved like a crescent moon, and her eyes carried old storms, shimmering with the loneliness of someone who had walked too long in the dark. She spun enchanted worlds from thread and dust and placed them in a cabinet of curiosities. The shelves carried the scent of candle wax, incense, and old remu, as though memory itself had settled into the wood. There her creations hummed with seductive light, filled with spells and broken clockwork that ticked softly at odd hours, as though remembering a different time. The world admired her artistry, though few understood the sadness that moved within her. She lived half in shadow, hidden behind the glow of her creations, pouring herself into the light, yet drawing a deepening darkness behind her.
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| In the the quiet of her cabinet, Tinuviel tends the curious things from which her dreams are woven. |
One day, they met in the velvet dusk, cool enough that the air brushed lightly against their skin, and something unspoken passed between them, like roots shifting under frozen earth. A canopy grew up, and in its branches hung glass jars glowing with captive stars — vessels of hope, longing, and unspoken dreams. The jars chimed softly when the breeze moved through them, their faint glow illuminating the leaves overhead in trembling arcs of light, as though the night itself were breathing.
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Peri sets the stars dancing, while Tinuviel traces the runes of an old magic. |
Beneath that canopy, in flickering pools of light, Tinuviel and Peri studied illuminated spellbooks written in celestial ink, their pages thin as gossamer, luminous where light passed through. In that quiet glow they intuited the mystical language that turns dream into form, tracing its symbols slowly with a fingertip before speaking them aloud, though the meanings lay just beyond the dawn of their understanding. And so they cast their spells in a world of mirrors with blurred edges, floating like shadows in a mist without end.
“Stay,” she said. “Hold this space for me and in it, absorb the things I cannot remember. These veiled mirrors are constellations only your stillness can transform. You, Peri, whose heart is a deep well, and whose spirit I would turn in secret spirals toward the sky.”
They reached for each other with the urgency of those who are drowning, for neither was made only of light. In each other they saw what they longed for. And yet, misunderstanding each other’s inner world's, they grasped after illusions, each unable to name what was truly missing.
This folly shaped their entanglement and cast a thousand shadows: flickering on the surface of the well, and sinking them into its depths, a drowning place they confused for love.
At first, the shadows beneath the canopy seemed no more than flickers cast by the turning of unseen stars. But as the darkness began to gather, Peri tried to name it. He spoke softly, almost as if testing whether the words could survive the air between them, and the ground gave way. So he grew careful with his speech, and the mist between them thickened, the light in the jars growing dimmer at their edges.
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The jars break, and their gathered starlight sinks into the well. |
In time, the darkening well swallowed the light, and the jars, one by one, fell and shattered, silent star-glass settling in the depths. The spellbooks faded to whispers only the attentive might still hear.
The light diffused until direction itself felt uncertain, and the mirror-world mist thickened until Tinuviel and Peri could no longer see each other’s outlines. So, in time, they did not find each other again, though traces of starlight lingered in memory.
Sometimes, Tinuviel would discover a single shard glowing on her windowsill, filled with a sliver of light, cool in her palm, its colour shifting with the hour.
And Peri, wandering the edge of the realm where gravity bends sideways, would feel the tension of an invisible wire beneath his feet, leading him toward a place he no longer feared.
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Peri feels the tension of an unseen wire beneath his feet. |
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| Yet even the smallest shard remembers the light |
Love often begins not with understanding, but with recognition, a flash of familiarity that draws us toward another, believing they hold something we lack. But recognition is not always truth. Sometimes, it is a mirror held at an angle, reflecting only the outline of our longing.
In The Mirror Made of Bone, Tinuviel and Peri are archetypes of a deep human pattern. Their tragedy lies not in their meeting, but in the misreading of the magic they see in each other. True intimacy requires more than feeling, it asks for clarity. More than devotion, it demands self-awareness.
Without clear boundaries, love can distort into something else. In such a spell, one may vanish in the name of love, or one may live behind a practiced exterior, concealing a self too fractured to face.
I did not leave because love ended. I left because my body could not survive the cost.
In the end, The Mirror Made of Bone traces how bonds shaped by old wounds and unmet needs can distort love, weaving a spell that binds through longing rather than truth. While I believe our love was genuine, it unfolded within unconscious patterns formed long before we met — patterns that refused to be named, and in time made sustaining the relationship impossible.
The deepest learning for me was recognising how I allowed myself to become a container for another person's unresolved pain while my own emotional reality was denied, dismissed, or distorted. What began as love became a slow erasure as I contorted myself around somebody else's wounds in the hope of preserving the connection. For a long time, I felt I was carrying a weight of sadness and chronic unrest that did not belong to me, leaving little room for my own inner life when I became depleted.
I do not believe this was done consciously or with cruelty. I believe it emerged from deeper currents neither of us fully understood. But over time, it exhausted me and eroded my sense of safety and self.
If this story has a meaning, it is this:
love can be real, and still not be survivable. Sometimes the most honest thing a person can do is step back into their own life, even when the heart would prefer another ending.
Within that rupture lies the beginning of healing. By naming the pattern and reclaiming the voice I had withheld, the story becomes an act of self-repair. It is not a tale of failure, but of awakening — the breaking of a spell, and the return to one's own centre.
And this, perhaps, is the night-sea journey of the artist and of the soul: to descend, to gather lost light from the well of the psyche, and through that descent, to rise reshaped. For it is through those luminous fractures that we begin to return to ourselves — not as illusions but as beings finally capable of love.
Bricolage illustration from the graphic novel Carnival Land (2011), incorporating a photographed image of the author posed as the character “Peri.” The work was gifted to the author.
A Final Note
There is one thing I have struggled with while telling this story.
Throughout this post, I have tried to write with restraint, preserving the beauty that existed between us and the love that, in many ways, I never stopped feeling. That restraint has sometimes meant leaving certain realities only half spoken.
The truth is that the relationship did not end simply because love faded or because two people quietly drifted apart. Love was present until the very end. What became impossible was the emotional environment in which that love existed.
Over the years arguments between us sometimes took on a volatile and irrational intensity. When those storms gathered I would often try to disengage, to step away and allow things to cool down. Again and again I explained that space was the only way I knew to prevent things from escalating further.
But leaving was not always allowed.
On more than one occasion attempts to step outside or drive away were physically blocked. Once the situation became so extreme that I called the police.
One evening stands in my memory because it captured the strange dissonance that had become part of our life together. What began as a small domestic moment — the woman I loved wanting to show me how to apply a skin cream — spiralled into another argument.
I withdrew into my study and tried to close the door, hoping to give us both space. But the door was pushed open. Objects from my desk were thrown aside, and my guitar was knocked over. My heart was racing now. I was trying to get away from the confrontation.
I began looking for my car keys so I could leave the house and let things settle. When this became clear, the anger intensified. The doorway was blocked. As I tried to step past, I was struck twice on the side of the head while being shouted at that I was an aggressive male.
I remember standing there in shock and saying quietly,
“You are scaring me.”
What made moments like this so destabilising was not only the events themselves, but what followed afterwards. When I tried to speak about them I was told that leaving arguments unresolved was the real problem. When I mentioned being struck, it was dismissed as ridiculous — something of no consequence, something no one could seriously believe would be harmful to me.
And yet these same days would be followed by messages filled with love, words describing how deeply she cared for me and how desperately she wanted the relationship to survive.
For a long time I tried to reconcile those two realities. I bent myself into many shapes trying to soften what had happened, hoping that if I was careful enough with the truth we might still find a way back to each other.
Eventually I realised that love alone was not enough to resolve that contradiction.
This story is not written to condemn the woman I loved. I believe the love she expressed was real. But the truth is that the relationship had become a place where I could no longer feel emotionally safe.
In the end, the mirror we built together was not made only of wonder and starlight. It was also made of the harder materials of truth, fragments that could not be reshaped or hidden without distorting the reflection. For a long time I tried to polish that mirror until it showed only beauty. But mirrors, like bones, hold the memory of what they are made from. To look into it honestly now is not to erase the love that once lived there, but simply to see the whole reflection at last.
And perhaps that is all any mirror of bone can offer: not perfection, but the quiet courage to look at what remains when the light returns.
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