Ah, the looking-glass. It offers no lies, you see, but a dreadful, shimmering truth that flits just beyond the grasp. The reflection—it is not me, not entirely, but a momentary arrangement of light and shadow, a glimpse of the self in the continuous, maddening current of being. Each faint line etched around the mouth, each deepening crease—they are not chronological scars, but fragments of perception, silent witnesses to skirmishes fought in the dim drawing-rooms of the mind and victories so quiet they barely disturbed the dust.

The eyes. They hold the most compelling, unsettling narrative. Once, yes, a certain brightness, perhaps the innocence we speak of, that blissful lack of definition. Now, a subtle, almost imperceptible hardness resides there, a polished surface reflecting the sharp edges of realities met and endured. They carry the weight of those restless, unstitched nights, not slept through, but felt through—the soul’s incessant, subterranean labor. The mouth, that poor, vulnerable curve where doubts were once whispered like stray currents, now settles into a quiet assertion, shaped not merely by the bold pronouncements made, but by the multitude of necessary silences, the words swallowed whole, which then rearrange the very bone structure of conviction.

And that fold, that tiny, insistent furrow between the brows. It is not an error, but an indelible punctuation mark. A permanent crease from the intensity of gazing inward, outward, simultaneously. It is the repository of memory, not an album of dates, but the raw, unsorted residue of moments that have battered and formed the interior architecture. It is, perhaps, the truest proof of life lived fully, in that rushing, bewildering stream.

In this flicker of introspection, standing before the surface, the focus shifts entirely from the need for perfection—that tiresome, external demand. I recognize, instead, the profound, essential beauty of being unfinished, the rich, unsettling depth of the self that was, and the trembling, unformed hope for the self that yet may be. For the narrative, like the light dancing on the mirror, is not a collection of neat episodes, but a complex, fragile tapestry of consciousness, where every precious thread—every momentary sensation, every fleeting thought—contributes to the bewildering complexity of existence.

©️ Beatriz Esmer