The Threshold

You have held the mirror as a shield for so long, you mistake the glass for the world. But the face across from you always belonged to a stranger. Their eyes hold weather you did not live. Laughter you never heard carved the lines around their mouth. Grief you will never touch hollowed their cheeks. One day the glass catches a face that refuses to be held. The mirror slips. The sound it makes is too small for what it ends – the last word of the only world you knew. The floor fills with bright refusals. In the ruin: a face that is not yours.

The Way

The old habit does not break with the mirror. Shards still catch light at your feet – you reach for the light in them, and your fingers close on nothing. You kneel and press the pieces together. The edges cut exactly where they refuse to join. Your hands give up before you do. In that stillness, the stranger remains: eyes holding seasons you did not make; grief moving where you cannot follow; joy that does not need you. The hand does not stop reaching; it stops grasping. The fingers open. Their eyes find yours and expect nothing.

The Shadow

The Astute held someone once – all her weight, all her unguessed substance. His arms learnt her shape. When he finally looked up, she had already turned away. He gave a year. She gave a season. Faces exhaust him now. Every new face is another door preparing to close. He builds a theatre behind his eyes – casting every stranger before their face forms. This one a tool, that one an obstacle, the rest mere audience. He dictates their lines, shrinking the stage until surprise is starved out. He craved witnesses. He made them all too small to witness. ❖ The Adoring finds the mirror empty and fills it with a stranger. She looked into the glass once and found no one looking back. Only a shape waiting to be told what it was. Her hand met her own face and could not feel it. Now she angles every mirror towards him. She studies his reflection as she never studied her own, gilding it with the virtues she cannot find in herself. Every brushstroke paints over a gesture she never made. Beneath the gilt, her own face goes quietly out. When the gilt flakes away, she screams betrayal at the stranger beneath. The brush is still wet in her hand.

The Cut