Mirrors

You want to know who you are, so you look in mirrors— reflective surfaces offered by lovers, enemies, strangers scrolling through a feed.

Each one shows you something different. In some, you’re beautiful. In others, you’re breaking. In most, you’re both.

The trick is learning which mirrors to trust.

I stopped looking at most of them after a while. Not because I found myself— but because I got tired of being disappointed by how incomplete every reflection was.

The real you, the complicated one, the one that contains contradictions and contradictions to those contradictions— that you doesn’t fit in any mirror.

That you only exists in the spaces in between. In the pauses. In the moments when no one’s watching.

So I stopped asking mirrors to confirm my existence.

I started asking myself instead. And found out I already knew.

Had known all along. Just needed the silence to hear it.