What the Mirror Kept
鏡が留めたもの
The mirror in the childhood room was tall, , and older than anything I had ever owned.
When I raised my hand toward it, my lifted hers a full heartbeat too late.
She moved as if she possessed a will entirely her own, quite separate from my body.
I stepped to the left; she lingered, watching me, with her dark eyes fixed steadily on mine.
It was as though the glass had been keeping a version of me it now refused to release.
When I smiled to reassure myself, she did not smile, but studied me with quiet, unbearable .
She leaned slowly closer, with both her pale hands pressed flat against the cold inner surface.
Her lips moved as if she were teaching me a secret I ought, by now, already to know.
"You have done all this before," she mouthed, with her gaze never once leaving my frightened face.
I spoke aloud, and my answered a moment later, as if translating from another time.
She behaved as though she remembered every visit I could no longer bring myself to recall.
With her fingers spread wide, she began, patiently, to push against the thinning glass between us.
The mirror trembled as if it were a soft rather than a solid, silvered .
I should have fled, yet I stood , with my own reaching slowly out toward me.
She grasped my wrist, her grip warm, as if flesh and glass had never truly divided us at all.
For one long moment we stood joined, with the room reflected behind our two faces.
Then she stepped forward into the room, and I felt myself drawn helplessly back into the glass.
From inside the mirror I watched her stretch, breathe, and smile as if newly, gladly alive.
She wore my clothes, my face, my grief, with an ease I had never once managed myself.
"Rest now," she said kindly, with her warm palm laid flat against the cold outer glass.
"You kept the house company; now it is my turn, as it was always going to be."
Behind her, on the shelf, the aged photograph had at last stopped its long, slow changing.
The woman in the frame and the woman in the room now shared a single, age.
I pressed against the glass, as if pressing might undo a I never knew I had made.
But the mirror only kept me, quietly, the way it had kept so many others long before.