  Although it is indeed commonly believed that, as frozen supercooled liquids,
glasses should continue to flow over the years (e.g., in the case of the
stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals), the dramatic increase of their
viscosity below the glass transition temperature suggests, on the contrary,
that their relaxation time is on the order of 10$^{32}$ years at room
temperature. However, a recent study conducted by Mauro et al. reported the
intriguing dynamics of the relaxation of a commercial Corning Gorilla Glass at
room temperature, over 1.5 years. Here, we report a novel atomistic simulation
method allowing us to directly access the long-term (years) dynamics of glass
relaxation at room temperature. Based on the simulation of a series of mixed
alkali silicate glasses, we demonstrate that room-temperature relaxation is a
direct consequence of the mixed alkali effect. Although both volume and energy
feature a stretched exponential relaxation, our results reveal a bifurcation of
the stretching exponents, with $\beta$ = 3/5 and 3/7 for energy and volume
relaxation, respectively. Relaxation is found to occur through the diffusion of
local stressed structural instabilities inside the atomic network, which anneal
each other when a compressed atomic unit meets one that is under tension. The
driving force for such diffusion-trap relaxation mechanism is found to be at a
maximum when the concentrations of each alkali atom equal each other, which
arises from a balance between the concentration of each alkali atom and the
magnitude of the local stress that they undergo.
