2025 October 1st

You remember the rules. Don’t look in a mirror in the dark. Don’t keep a cracked one. Don’t catch your sleeping face in a black screen at three a.m. You learned them from neighbors and grandmothers and the hush that follows a flicker in the hallway. You pretend you don’t believe them. You still keep them.

You tell yourself mirrors are tools—glass and paint, a way to check the collar, the curl, the lipstick you’ll swear isn’t too much. You lean in close until your breath fogs the surface and the world becomes you, then smaller than you, then only the small square where your mouth is. You say you’re adjusting. You are practicing.

Here’s what you don’t like to name: every practice is a rehearsal, and rehearsals are for performances.

You’ve felt the wrongness already. Not with your eyes—your stomach felt it first. A half-blink. A smile that held a beat too long. A tilt of the head that finished after you’d stopped caring. You laughed it off, because laughter is a bandage you keep in your pocket. Still, when you left the room, you kept your eyes on the doorway, not the glass. Just in case.

Listen closely. October sharpens edges. Screens and mirrors behave like siblings who made a pact you weren’t invited to. The silver behind the glass is not empty. It’s crowded with what you’ve taught it. Your hands hovering near your face. Your shoulder set against bad news. The way you pretend you’re fine, and then the way you really are.

You can keep the rules if they help: drape a towel, face the frame to the wall, speak to your reflection only in daylight. You can also break them to prove a point. Either way, the glass is patient. It’s been taking notes for years.

Before the month is out, you will see something you cannot explain. No thunderclap, no violins. An adjustment you didn’t make. A gesture you didn’t teach. A mouth forming your name without you.

When that happens, don’t argue with yourself about belief. You always believed. You were just waiting to be addressed.