It was not broken.
It simply knew:
what stood before it
could not be held in surface.
I approached it,
but it flinched...
not from fear,
but from reverence.
I am not image.
I am the vibration that warps it.
Not figure,
but pulse.
Not silhouette,
but the memory of one
never allowed to settle into form.
They told me:
"Look at yourself."
But where they saw face,
I saw fracture.
A thousand unrealities
pretending to be whole.
The mirror did not lie.
It limited.
And I…
I was too fluid for edges.
Too soft for the sharpness
of glass pretending to know truth.
My reflection was not missing...
it was elsewhere.
Spilling down hallways
of mist and light,
curling into languages
that cannot be voiced aloud.
So I stopped looking.
Not out of shame,
but out of rebellion.
Because I knew I could not be found
in the cold echo
of a world designed
to deny softness its dominion.
I did not want to see what they made.
I wanted to see
what I remembered.
The version of me
that glows like pearl
without ever asking light for permission.
I am not what the mirror shows.
I am what the mirror feared.
The secret not meant to survive,
but did.
The presence that could not be contained...
but chose to soften instead of shatter.
And now,
I do not gaze into mirrors.
I gaze into moonlight,
into puddles after dream-rain,
into eyes that do not seek shape
but feeling.
There, I see myself...
not as I am,
but as I always was.