It started the morning after she left.
The air was heavy with the kind of silence that follows a storm — not peaceful, but uncertain. The bed beside me was cold, the indentation still there, like a ghost of warmth that hadn’t decided whether to disappear. Her pillow smelled faintly of rosemary shampoo and something floral I could never name.
I didn’t get up right away. For a while, I just stared at the ceiling, tracing cracks that looked like veins. Maybe everything in this apartment was alive — the walls, the floorboards, even the dust motes that floated lazily in the air. They all seemed to breathe her absence.
When I finally dragged myself to the bathroom, my body moved like it had forgotten how. My face felt heavy, my eyes swollen. I turned on the tap and splashed water on my face, watching the ripples distort my reflection.
And that’s when I noticed.
When I lifted my head, my reflection didn’t.
It stayed still. Perfectly still. Water dripped down my cheeks, but on the other side of the glass, my reflection’s face was dry. Its eyes met mine — no, they didn’t meet mine. They studied me. Cold, disappointed, and so heartbreakingly human.
For a moment, I thought maybe I hadn’t slept. Maybe this was the exhaustion playing tricks. I blinked, tilted my head, raised my hand. Nothing. The reflection remained frozen, its expression soft and… sad.
I laughed — a nervous, hollow sound. “Okay,” I muttered to myself. “Sleep deprivation. That’s all.”
But even as I said it, my reflection’s lips parted just slightly, like it wanted to say something.
I stumbled back, knocking over a toothbrush holder. It clattered to the floor, and for a second, the reflection winced.
That was the first time I realized it wasn’t just my imagination.
Over the next few days, I avoided mirrors. I brushed my teeth in the dark, shaved by touch, showered with the lights off. But mirrors are everywhere — elevator doors, window panes, black screens waiting to be unlocked. Every reflective surface held a version of me that wouldn’t follow.
And every time, the same look. That same quiet disappointment.
It wasn’t the anger of someone who hates you. It was the sorrow of someone who once believed in you — and doesn’t anymore.
It wasn’t always like this.
When she and I were together, my reflection was almost… lighter. I used to joke that I could see love in my own face. The way my eyes softened when she laughed, the way my smile tilted when she looked at me.
We had built this apartment together — at least, the version of together that fit between deadlines and compromises. She loved mirrors. She said they made the rooms look bigger, brighter. There was one in every corner — a tall one by the closet, a round one in the hallway, even a small one near the kitchen sink that caught the light in the mornings.
After she left, they all became traps.
I started covering them — old sheets, towels, anything I could find. It felt superstitious, like hiding the eyes of the house. Still, no matter how careful I was, I’d catch glimpses — a sliver of glass, a shimmer of silver. And there it would be. That other me, waiting.
Sometimes, I’d feel it watching even when I wasn’t looking.
A week later, I broke.
I couldn’t take the silence anymore. The way the apartment had started to feel like a tomb filled with echoes. So I did what any heartbroken fool would do — I tried to talk to it.
It was late. I had a bottle of something too strong and not enough light. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, my own eyes red-rimmed and unsteady.
“You win,” I said softly. “Say whatever you came here to say.”
The reflection stared back.
Then, after a long pause — it blinked.
I froze. My breath caught.
Its mouth opened, but no sound came out. Only a tremor in its expression, like it was struggling to find words through glass. Then it raised a hand — slow, hesitant — and placed it flat against the mirror.
I felt my own hand twitch. I lifted it, almost against my will, until my palm met the cold surface.
There was a faint vibration, like the hum of a low note. For a heartbeat, I thought I felt warmth — her warmth.
Then it mouthed something.
Two words.
You changed.
The words hit harder than I expected.
Because she had said them too.
The night she left, her voice had cracked on the same sentence. “You’ve changed,” she’d said, standing in the doorway with her coat half on. I had laughed then, in disbelief. “Of course I have. So have you.”
But that wasn’t what she meant. And deep down, I knew it.
I had become quieter, colder. I stopped asking her about her day. I’d work late, come home, and scroll through meaningless things just to fill the noise. When she cried, I didn’t hold her. I told her to stop overreacting.
And now, my reflection — I — was holding me accountable.
Days blurred into nights.
The reflection didn’t move often, but when it did, it felt purposeful. Sometimes it mimed breathing, as if reminding me to do the same. Other times it mouthed things I couldn’t decipher — half-sentences, unfinished thoughts.
Once, I caught it writing something in fog when I showered. Words appeared faintly in the steam: Don’t forget who you were.
I wiped the glass quickly, but the outline stayed for a while.
I tried ignoring it. I really did. I went to work, met friends, forced smiles. But every time I passed a window, I’d catch glimpses of disappointment — in the way I carried myself, the slouch of my shoulders, the dullness in my eyes.
It was like my reflection had become the conscience I’d buried.
One night, I dreamed of her.
She stood in our old apartment, bathed in warm morning light. She smiled at me — that same smile that used to make the world feel less impossible. Then she turned, and instead of walking out the door, she stepped into the mirror.
When I woke up, I could still hear the faint echo of glass closing.
And I understood something terrifying.
The reflection that stayed behind… wasn’t me. Not completely.
It was us. The version of us that existed before everything broke. The version I’d left behind when I started taking love for granted.
I started noticing differences.
My reflection’s eyes weren’t always sad anymore. Sometimes, they were searching — pleading. When I ignored phone calls from friends, the reflection shook its head. When I stayed up too late doomscrolling through her old photos, it turned away.
At first, I thought it was judging me. But over time, I realized it was trying to pull me back.
One morning, I woke up to find the mirror fogged again, even though I hadn’t showered. This time, the message was longer:
Go outside.
I hadn’t left the apartment in two days.
I stared at the words, heart pounding, and whispered, “Why are you doing this?”
The reflection smiled faintly — the first real smile in weeks — and mouthed, Because you used to live.
That day, I went for a walk.
It was raining, soft and gray, the kind of rain that doesn’t soak you immediately but stays long enough to blur the world. I didn’t bring an umbrella. The streets smelled of wet asphalt and pine. I walked past the café we used to visit, the bookstore where she once hid love notes in random novels, the park bench where we’d first kissed.
Everything looked the same, yet hollow. Like someone had painted over the life we’d lived with muted colors.
When I caught my reflection in a shop window, it wasn’t still this time. It was walking beside me.
I don’t know how to explain it — but I could feel it there, matching my pace, watching.
And for the first time, it didn’t look disappointed. It looked… proud.
That night, when I came home, I found something new.
The mirror wasn’t showing the room anymore. It was showing her.
She was sitting on the couch, knees drawn up, wearing that same oversized sweater she’d taken with her when she left. She looked peaceful, almost translucent, like a memory that had been left to fade.
I reached out instinctively, hand trembling.
She looked up, and for a moment, our eyes met through the glass.
Then she said — or maybe thought — “You finally saw me.”
The reflection behind her — my reflection — smiled faintly, and slowly, the image began to dissolve.
In the mirror’s surface, all that was left was me. Just me. But for once, I didn’t feel alone.
The mirror stayed quiet after that night.
For days, I stood before it, waiting for something — another message, another movement, another glimpse of her face. But it only gave me myself again. My own eyes, tired but softer somehow. The hollowness that used to echo in my chest had quieted, replaced by something gentler, like grief that finally learned how to breathe.
I almost missed the silence of it.
Because the silence meant peace.
But peace never stays.
It was a Tuesday evening when I heard the sound. A soft hum, low and persistent, like the vibration of an old fluorescent light. I was in the kitchen, rinsing out a mug, when I realized it wasn’t coming from any appliance. It was coming from the mirror in the hallway — the one she bought from a thrift shop, saying it had “good bones.”
I walked toward it slowly, each step echoing louder than the last. The light in the hallway flickered once, twice, then steadied.
The hum deepened.
And then — the reflection moved again.
This time, it wasn’t me. Not exactly.
It was an older version. My hair longer, my face more lined, eyes carrying years I hadn’t lived yet.
He — I — looked tired. But not in the same way I was now. His exhaustion wasn’t from sleepless nights or heartbreak; it was the kind that came from knowing too much and wishing you didn’t.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
The reflection smiled faintly, almost apologetically. Then he mouthed the words: I stayed.
A shiver crawled down my spine.
He reached forward, fingertips pressing against the inside of the glass. I hesitated, then mirrored him. The moment our palms met, a cold shock ran through me — not like touching ice, but like touching memory.
Flashes — moments that weren’t mine yet — rushed through my head. A different apartment. A gray-haired man standing by a hospital bed. A photo of a woman — not her, but someone else — smiling by a window.
And then, his voice, soft and breaking, echoed in my head.
“You forgot again.”
I stumbled backward. “Forgot what?”
He didn’t answer. His expression hardened — not in anger, but in grief. He lifted a hand and wrote on the fog that bloomed across the mirror’s surface.
Don’t leave her like you did the last one.
Before I could respond, the image cracked — thin fractures spiderwebbing across the glass, but the mirror itself didn’t break. Only the reflection shattered, piece by piece, until I was staring at my own face again.
And my own face looked terrified.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
The message haunted me. Don’t leave her like you did the last one.
But who was “her”? The woman in the future memory? Someone I hadn’t met yet? Or… was it her — the one who had already left — meaning I would lose her again in another way?
Grief does strange things to the mind. It twists time. It makes you relive things you thought you survived.
I started to wonder if every reflection I’d seen wasn’t just me — but fragments. Different versions of myself caught in the glass, each one staying behind when I refused to feel something.
The one who stayed after the breakup. The one who stayed to mourn. The one who stayed to remind me who I used to be.
Maybe every time I walked away from pain too quickly, I left a piece of myself in the mirror.
And maybe now, they wanted to be remembered.
The days grew slower after that.
I tried to live normally. Work, errands, calls. But I noticed the mirrors more than ever.
In store windows, I’d see my reflection standing still after I moved. In the subway, my image in the glass doors would look older, sadder, wiser.
Once, at night, I caught sight of something impossible — a small crowd of reflections standing behind me in the dark window of my living room. Dozens of me. Some looked angry. Some looked mournful. One looked… relieved.
And every one of them had that same look of disappointment.
Like a chorus of unfinished lives, watching the one who got away.
I tried covering the mirrors again. But this time, it didn’t help.
When I covered one, another uncovered itself. Sheets slipped off, as if pulled from the inside. My reflection — or whatever it was now — wanted to be seen.
One evening, after days of avoiding it, I stood before the largest mirror in my apartment — the tall one she had insisted on buying because it “made the mornings brighter.”
“Enough,” I said aloud, voice shaking. “What do you want from me?”
The reflection tilted its head. Slowly, one by one, all the other reflections in the room — from framed photos, shiny tabletops, even the black TV screen — began to move in sync.
A hundred me’s, all turning their heads together.
Then, as one, they mouthed the same word.
Remember.
I swallowed hard. “Remember what?”
They didn’t answer. Instead, the light dimmed until the only thing visible was their faces glowing faintly through the glass.
And in their eyes, I saw scenes I had forgotten — no, avoided.
The argument. Her tears. The moment she said, “You don’t see me anymore.”
The way I had looked away, too proud to beg her to stay.
And there it was — the last look she gave me before she left.
It wasn’t anger. It was disappointment.
The same disappointment that now lived behind every mirror.
The next morning, I woke up with an idea that felt half-mad, half-right.
If the mirror remembered who I used to be, maybe I could meet him again. Not the reflection that stayed behind, but the person who hadn’t yet lost everything.
I uncovered every mirror in the house. Wiped the dust, straightened the frames, let the light fill the rooms again. The air felt heavier, but also cleaner — like something waiting to happen.
Then I stood before the bathroom mirror — the first one that refused to follow me weeks ago.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “For forgetting. For leaving. For changing.”
For a moment, nothing. Just silence.
Then my reflection smiled — small, hesitant, but real. It moved with me again.
When I raised my hand, it did too. When I tilted my head, it followed.
I almost cried. The balance was back.
But as I stepped closer, I noticed something strange. The reflection’s eyes were glistening — not with light, but with tears.
And then it whispered, clear as a voice in my ear:
“It’s too late for you.”
I stumbled back, heart hammering. “What do you mean?”
But the reflection’s face was already changing. The features blurred, like a wet painting being smeared. And then her face appeared — her eyes, her lips, her expression of quiet heartbreak.
Only this time, she looked peaceful.
She mouthed something too, so faintly I had to lean in close to the glass to read it.
You learned. That’s enough.
My hand trembled against the mirror. “Are you… are you happy?” I asked, my voice cracking.
Her image smiled — a kind of smile that forgives without saying the words.
Then she turned, stepped backward into the fog of the reflection, and vanished.
And the mirror cleared — leaving only me again.
But this time, the eyes that stared back weren’t disappointed.
They were simply tired — and alive.
The apartment felt lighter after that.
The mirrors stayed still. The reflections obeyed. The silence, once suffocating, became bearable — almost gentle. I began to live again, slowly, carefully. I took walks. I opened windows. I even started painting, something she always said I should try.
Weeks passed. Then months.
And for the first time in a long while, I felt like myself again.
Until last night.
I came home late, the city lights spilling across the living room. As I passed the mirror by the door, I saw something — a small flicker, like a glitch in an old video.
I turned back.
In the reflection, I was smiling.
But I wasn’t.
The reflection’s smile grew, slow and deliberate. Then it mouthed something I couldn’t hear. I stepped closer, breath fogging the glass.
And as the fog spread, the words appeared again — in her handwriting this time.
You didn’t stay.
Then the lights went out.
No one can tell me what that means.
Maybe the reflection is wrong. Maybe it’s testing me. Or maybe it’s right — maybe I’m still the kind of person who leaves. The kind who heals halfway and calls it a victory.
But every night since then, I’ve noticed it. The faintest delay between my movements and my reflection’s. Just a fraction of a second. Enough to remind me that somewhere, beyond the glass, the one who stayed is still watching.
Still waiting for me to remember — not her, not us, but myself.
Because maybe that’s the cruelest thing about mirrors.
They never lie.
They only wait.
Want to read a bit more? Find some more of my writings here-
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