Under the Skin, There Are Roads

They say we leave our trails in ourselves, not in the world. Every grief, every year we pretended not to notice, every small vow broken softly—none of it vanishes. It hides in the body and waits. Bones remember angles even after posture changes. Scars memorize what language forgets. Blood, it turns out, is an archivist with a key to every locked room.

I didn’t set out to prove any of this. I only woke up too early, in that hour when appliances hum like insects and the light at the window looks undecided. I was making coffee, waiting for the water to reach its polite simmer, when I noticed a faint line beneath the skin of my wrist. Not a vein. A glimmer—thin as thread, bright as a thought you can’t quite recall. I touched it. It dimmed, then returned. Like it was trying to pull away from my finger.

I went to the mirror because that is what we do when we suspect we might be vanishing. I placed my wrist against the glass. The room was cool; the pane was colder. I said, “Show me,” out loud, the way you speak to a room you live in alone.

The mirror answered with warmth, not words. A small pulse traveled through the glass and into my arm. For a second, I swore I felt my heart again—and then I understood it wasn’t my heart at all. It was memory, organizing itself.

Lines began to appear under the skin, not drawn but surfacing—routes lighting up across a map that had been printed there for years. One shone at my throat, another along my ribs, a tiny constellation near my shoulder that brightened when I breathed in and faded when I breathed out. I traced them gently. The light retreated from my touch the way a shy animal does, not afraid, just cautious.

The mirror didn’t imitate me. It anticipated. When I lifted my hand, my reflection lifted two. When I leaned closer, the figure in the glass did not. He—let’s call him that to be honest about it—studied me with the careful attention of someone reading a diagram in a language they once knew.

He warmed the air between us. Faint lines—light, not ink—bloomed on the surface of the glass and reached toward my wrist like vines seeking a trellis. When the first touched skin, my kitchen went quiet in the way rooms do right before something falls. I saw corridors inside myself: apartment hallways I’ve lived in, stairwells I’ve avoided, years I didn’t finish properly. The routes weren’t straight. They doubled back, crossed themselves, formed little loops around certain names. I could hear the refrigerator humming, but farther away, as if it had stepped into another room to be polite.

Maps are supposed to tell you where you are. This one told me where I had been unwilling to look.

He—my reflection, or my double, or the part of me that refuses to be translated—rearranged the light. Circles within circles appeared on the wall, a soft spill of geometry sliding over the paint. There were bright points I recognized immediately: the day the picture didn’t take, the afternoon the light forgot to lie, the hour a door appeared where no door had ever been. You don’t need me to explain these; if you’ve ever lived through your own myth, you already know how it rearranges the furniture.

There were dark places too: little wells where the light pooled and didn’t reflect back. I touched one at my sternum and felt something like pressure, like a weather system moving through bone.

“What are these?” I asked, because sometimes it helps to pretend you’re not alone.

He drew a single line between two bright points—throat to shoulder—and I felt the path catch, the way a necklace catches in hair. Then he drew another, sternum to wrist. The routes became lattice. I saw, briefly, the whole of it: my body as country, my days as border, my names as waypoints. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so recognizably mine.

“How many lives fit inside one body?” I said, which is the kind of question you ask when you know the answer isn’t an integer.

No sound came from the mirror. Instead, one of the dark wells widened. The other lines brightened in what I can only describe as avoidance. The lattice bent around the darkness as if it were a hole in the world. You know the shape: the thing you walk a block out of your way not to pass; the message you don’t open; the room you won’t enter because you remember who you were the last time you did.

“Where does it lead?” I asked, though I already felt the pull. It wasn’t pain. It was the sensation of being remembered by something you didn’t consent to keep.

The black center filled the frame, starless and intimate. The light under my skin responded like tide—drawing back, returning, drawn again. One by one, the routes lifted out of me and into the air, as if the map wanted to be looked at directly. They hung between me and the glass, trembling like aurora, making a small sound I could feel more than hear.

Then, with the polite decisiveness of a choice made long ago, the routes folded into the darkness.

The room dimmed, not dramatically, just enough to make the coffee smell stronger and the hum of the microwave sound farther away than it should. I put my palm to the mirror. Cold, then warmer where my hand was. I didn’t see my face—only a surface that felt like breath about to write something on itself.

“This is the center,” I said, trying the sentence on.

No, said a voice I recognized as mine and not mine. This is the edge.

I didn’t move. I waited the way you wait at a crosswalk in a city you trust, listening for a change in a sound you don’t consciously register. The mirror didn’t offer an explanation. It gave me a direction: a small pulse beneath the heel of my hand, then another farther down the glass, as if marking points on a coastline. Under the skin, the faint roads brightened for a moment and dimmed again, a private Morse no one else would have noticed.

This is the part I hesitate to put on paper, because it reads like superstition, and I am trying, these days, to be the kind of person who names things gently without making them behave. But a map that won’t stay in one place is not a diagram. It’s an invitation.

I followed the pulses the way you follow old instructions: not because you believe them, but because you remember who you were when they were written. Wrist to sternum. Sternum to throat. Throat to temple. The routes lit and faded beneath my fingertips like patient creatures. The mirror warmed, and somewhere between my palm and the glass, I felt the distance thin to nothing. The body being an atlas means you can get lost in it. It also means there are exits you don’t discover until you’re already outside.

The dark place receded when I did this. Not gone—edges don’t vanish; they redefine—but less hungry. The routes settled back under the skin with a softness that reminded me of weather changing while you sleep. I saw not just where I had refused to look, but how to step beside it without calling it by its old name.

When I finally spoke again, my voice sounded like the room had become larger.

“Thank you,” I said, and felt ridiculous, and not at all.

Not parallel, he mouthed on the other side of the glass, the way a person silently corrects a dear friend. Crossing.

I left my hand there a moment longer. The pane smelled faintly of rain, though the forecast had promised a dry day. You will say that was my imagination. I will agree with you and mean it differently than you do.

I made coffee again. The kettle ticked as it cooled. I didn’t turn on any other lights. When I looked back at the mirror, he was gone—no drama, no dimming. Just the ordinary absence we call normal when we have to be somewhere by nine.

The routes under my skin remained invisible in ordinary light. That’s how it is with maps once you’ve walked them: they dissolve into the terrain and let you pretend you’re not carrying them. But if I press my wrist to the glass at dawn or after midnight, if the room is quiet enough to hear the refrigerator thinking, the lines brighten for a moment as if to say, Here. Here is where you are, if you are brave enough to use a coordinate that moves.

I am trying to be that person. I don’t know if I’ll succeed. Most days, I forget and then remember and then pretend I haven’t remembered again. But there is a kindness in knowing where the edges are and a mercy in calling them what they are: not ends. Borders you can move carefully across if you keep your eyes soft.

This is not advice. It’s a field note from a map that learned my name and wrote it with light.

If you ever feel a pulse in your reflection, don’t follow it.

It isn’t your heart you’re feeling—it’s the world tracing your outline, trying to remember where it left you.

Every glance draws another line. Every mirror keeps your coordinates. And one day, when the light has mapped you completely, it will stop pretending to be yours.