The Glass Between

The mirror holds a stranger wearing my clothes, breathing on the other side of a boundary so thin I could cross it with a whisper.

We don't quite touch—there's always glass, always this peculiar distance where the light bends, where my hand becomes a shadow reaching backward.

I've spent years studying the grammar of that other face, the way it learns what I already know, the lag of recognition in its eyes.

Sometimes I wonder if the mirror sees itself at all, or if it too is caught between two worlds, translating me into a language of absence.

The stranger smiles. I smile. The glass stays cool against my palm.