The Surface Remembers

The glass gathers light like a mouth collecting words— catches your half-self and holds it still, that other who blinks when you move, whose shadows live left when yours lean right.

We look for ourselves in these stolen rooms, these polished throats that swallow and return what they cannot keep. Your face is borrowed here, a ghost that ages faster than the dark,

each morning a reckoning with that stranger who wears your skin like a borrowed coat. The surface never lies, they say, but it knows the weight of all the faces before you,

all the small desperate leaning-ins, the eyes searching for someone they can trust. In the end, what looks back isn't recognition— it's the mirror learning you by touch,

becoming less glass and more memory, less return and more refusal. You cannot touch your own reflection. This is the oldest mercy, the oldest ache.