Aftertaste

I am standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom, the light is too warm and yellow, the scene is soundless. My eyes catch themselves watching me, and for a moment I am both the keyhole and the door. I lift the hem of my dress. Beneath my ribs, my skin has vanished.

There is glass, a glass window. And behind it, a slow, silent machinery of intestines, turning and breathing like a secret garden I forgot I owned.

A scream blooms, not in my mouth but behind the glass — a silent, pulsing call from inside me. I am looking at myself, caught in an infinite loop of watching and being watched.

It isn’t horror that comes first. It’s longing: a desperate tenderness, as if the body behind the glass were pleading, Touch me. Love me. Remember me.

I reach for the mirror instead.

The longer I stare, the more the glass begins to breathe. My organs pulse in rhythm with the questions I’ve avoided. Every contraction, every movement of that living clockwork feels like language — but one I’ve forgotten how to read. I fed the machine, sold my hours to be seen by — someone, anyone. I was left alone, starving for self-awareness.

If I worked harder, spoke smarter, smiled longer, maybe someone would finally wave me off the hamster wheel. Someone. Anyone.

I feel a revolt. Maybe my belly has turned to glass because my insides were tired of being ignored. They wanted to be seen, even if it meant terrifying me.

I press my palm against my skin, half expecting it to shatter.

It doesn’t. The glass holds cool and unwavering. And in its reflection, I notice how empty my touch has become — functional, rushed, polite. When was the last time I touched my heart with affection, not maintenance?

The scream behind the glass isn’t rage; it’s grief.

The grief of a body that waited too long to be loved by its own inhabitant.

I want to say something to it — to me — but language feels useless, too linear.

All I can do is watch: a voyeur of my own need.

Maybe that’s what I’ve always been — a spectator, performing competence while quietly starving for warmth, building a world that runs on validation instead of intimacy…not by me… by someone, anyone.

I used to think mirrors were for correction — to fix hair, posture, expression.

Now I see they are invitations: openings to self-exploration.

The mirror flickers — not with light, but with attention.

My reflection blinks half a second too late, then exhales; fog blooms across the glass.

My reflection tilts her head. Her hand rises to meet mine, slower, deliberate. She presses her fingers against the border where my glass belly glows.

Her lips move, but no sound comes. The meaning lands somewhere deeper, in the body’s vocabulary: You forgot that I’m alive. Touch me.

I don’t know if she means the glass or the body beneath it. Maybe both.

I place my palm against the mirror’s surface. It’s colder than it should be, and the chill travels inward, spreading beneath my skin.

For a heartbeat our hands align — two halves of the same plea meeting at the edge of reality.

Then something shifts. My reflection slides her hand downward to the window in her belly. When she presses, I feel it — a pulse, faint but real, under my own glass.

A shared heartbeat.

As if the mirror and I have stopped being separate.

For a moment I see the impossible: inside the glass cavity, light moves.

It spills out like water, liquid and warm, flowing between organs like forgiveness.

And I realize — my reflection isn’t trying to frighten me.

She is showing me that what I’ve called hollow was always alive.

My reflection looks up, eyes wet and human.

When her mouth forms the final phrase, my lips move with hers: Be kind to me.

The glass fogs again, then clears.

The reflection stands still — ordinary once more.

But my body feels heavier, inhabited, awake.

My eyes open to the same white light as before, only grayer, the color of undone mornings.

For a suspended moment I don’t know where I am, because the mirror’s frame is still in my vision — a dark parenthesis around the bed — and the body I inhabit has a weight I don’t recognize. Heavier, yes, but rightly placed, as if someone returned a library book to the exact shelf it belonged.

I sit up. The room is ordinary again: pile of clothes on the chair, a glass with a thin ring of water, a notebook facing down like a sleeping bird. The mirror waits.

The dream is so close it leaves condensation on my thinking. If I breathe too fast it will vanish; if I don’t breathe at all I will, too.

I stand. The floor is cold. The dress from last night lies wrinkled on the floor like a comma; the sentence is over.

I go to the mirror. No drama now, no supernatural shimmer. Just a woman who needs to brush her hair and drink water and tell the day she exists.

I lift my shirt. The belly is skin again — not glass, not window — freckled, soft, alive.

I press my palm there, the way my reflection did, and wait.

No miracle, only the slow intelligence of the body returning its answer: warmth under my hand, a pulse, a faint gurgle, the language of living resuming its casual conversation.

I whisper to no one and to me: “I see you.”

At the table I take the notebook, open it to a clean page. The pen hesitates, then starts.

Not a to-do list. Not a quarterly ambition in bullet points.

A sentence, the simplest technology: I spit out my guts and fears, muddle them with hope and tears, sprinkle them with trust, season them with love. I take a sip — the aftertaste is bliss.

I put on my shoes. At the door I remember something from the dream — the line of the reflection’s mouth, how my lips formed the same phrase at the same time.

I speak it now, audible, domestic as a grocery list, sacred as a vow.

“Be kind to me.”

Outside, the air is honest.

Finally I feel seen...