A mirror broke in my apartment. I was out when it fell. I came home to the pieces scattered across the floor outside my bedroom closet. One of the perks to living alone is that there’s no rush to clean up your messes. You’re the only one affected by them. I let the mirror pieces lay on the floor while I did a couple hours of work. In fact, I forgot about it all together and only remembered after I got up to make a snack.

It appears the command hooks I installed gave out under the shockingly light weight of the mirror. I threw away the printed packaging, so I’m not sure what weight they were rated for. It’s possible the cheap mirror was too much for the hooks to handle but in my opinion four of them should have been more than sufficient. It’s possible the hooks weren’t the right tool for the job. I know that. I wonder now if I had used the stickers directly on the mirror and forgone the hooks altogether would things have turned out better? We can never know. The damage is done.

I have always heard that a broken mirror brings a streak of bad luck to the one who breaks it, and I’d certainly like to stay away from any of that nonsense. In my situation with the faulty hooks, who does that lack of good luck belong to? Does the responsibility belong to me or the CEO of the command hooks company? (We all know companies can’t lose luck) Maybe we’ll both get off scot-free because no one was around to witness the fall. I guess only time will tell.

One thing is clear, I’m the one who’s out the money and left to clean up the mess. I can’t exactly call up the CEO of command and ask them to come over and dispose of it. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t run the vacuum. That’s something you only think of if your bare toes are the ones at risk. The second time I passed the broken mess, I thought of some meme-y advice I read online: Don’t put off something you can do in under five minutes. I knelt to the carpet, first checking carefully for any glinting shards, and stacked the pieces on top of one another. I carried them to the front door as a reminder to take care of them the next time I left the apartment. I set them next to the coffee table where I could see them with my eyes, but was unlikely to find them with my foot. I’m not sure luck is real, but I do believe in karma.

On my next trip out, I balanced the biggest piece down three flights of stairs and out a door that I opened for myself. I shuffled carefully across snow and ice slippery from melting under the sun and then freezing again. I was so concerned with the icy patches, I tripped on a uneven sidewalk paver! I thought we were goners, but I managed to get an unchanged number of mirror pieces to the dumpster’s blissfully open side door. I gently chucked them in and listened for the satisfying tinkling sound that comes with breaking glass.