Self-Reflections (M)
I keep it in the corner there, hidden under a dark sheet in an empty room: the same way I found it the first time — the same way I find it every time — and it’s easy enough to forget it’s there. At least, until the air grows cold and the leaves skitter down the cobblestone street with the keening wind. Until I can feel the earth awakening on my walk home from work — ghostly palms pressed to my soles with every step, trying to push up and out of the earth and blossom back into life. Until there is nothing more I’d rather do than press myself into your neck and taste the sweet salt of your skin and feel your heartbeat with my lips.
Then it calls to me. Then my effortful forgetfulness is overcome with forbidden desire that burns like a sickness through me. Treatable, perhaps, through healer or memory charm. But I do not wish to be cured; let the fever take me.
The first time I looked was a mistake. Even then, I thought I would see myself surrounded by parents, grandparents, and those older still: the family I longed for beside me at last.
But instead I saw you. Only you.
Behind me, your hands sliding up from my shoulders and through my hair. Beside me, our hands woven together like a shroud so I can die over and over in your arms. In front of me, gripping my hips so tightly as you sing around me that I would cry out if I weren’t already choked with need.
And that accidental glance twisted into ritual with my longing. I tell myself it’s okay — a once a year indulgence — to rip off the cover with a sharpness that quickens my heart and my breath. To run my fingertips over the gilded frame of that cursed mirror. To pour myself a firewhisky and take my time to really look. To sit there through the liminal night and know the deepest most desperate desire of my heart.
I reach out, to change places with my mirror self, but the feeling of the cold. impenetrable glass is the only answer to my wanting touch. It haunts me. Like you do.
And when the sun rises, I pull the sheet neatly back into place, returning to my cold bed to dream until the sun quells the souls beneath the cobblestone and I can live my life, such as it is, once more.