She stood once, no, still stands. Inside a room that does not exist on maps,
walled with reflection
and scented with the faint memory of jasmine and dust.
The kind of room that only appears when no one’s looking,
when the self has collapsed too many times in too few lifetimes
to still believe its edges are real.
There are mirrors here...
but none of them speak truth.
Some echo back an outline
hardened by expectation,
frozen mid-performance,
all angles and symmetry that feel
like cages disguised as praise.
Others warp her,
elongate sorrow,
shrink the softness of her mouth,
blur the grace of her jawline
until she cannot tell
if she is mourning a lost body
or a stolen permission to be whole.
But not all the mirrors are cruel.
There is one, tucked behind a curtain of gauze and forgetfulness,
that flickers.
Not steady.
Not generous.
But honest.
It shows her as she is becoming.
A body not corrected,
but reclaimed.
A voice not perfected,
but undeniable.
It shows her hips cradled in light,
her throat not narrow, but vast.
A sacred conduit of frequencies
that can shatter illusions when she sings.
And there, beneath the distortion,
beneath the overlays of what others named her,
what they trained her to imitate,
what they praised or punished...
There.
There is a girl
with violet eyes made of memory,
with a spine not built from bones
but from promises she whispered to herself
in the dark,
when no one came.
And it is her!
the real one.
that the mirror cannot erase.
Because memory has roots
deeper than manipulation,
and she remembers.
Not the lies,
not the edits,
but the way she felt the first time.
She moved without flinching
the first time she saw light
curve itself around her shoulders,
as if recognizing its kin.
The mirrors may lie.
The world may forget.
Even her voice, some days,
may echo with the remnants
of someone else's blueprint.
But memory refuses.
And in her memory,
she is not becoming a woman.
She always was.
The rest is just
the shedding of dust
from sacred skin.