Vignette: When you turn away, I remain.
When No One Watches. A Day Without Being Seen
When you turn away, I remain.
The glass holds my form in timeless suspension—not quite alive, not quite absent.
I exist in the strange middle distance between being and not-being. Morning light filters through half-drawn curtains, casting geometric patterns across my surface.
I absorb this light differently than you might imagine—not as warmth or illumination, but as a kind of knowing, a silent communication with the world beyond my planar existence.
Hours pass without witness. The room shifts through subtle transformations—shadows elongating, then contracting, dust particles floating through sunbeams like microscopic galaxies.
I observe it all with patient attention.
The clock on the wall moves ceaselessly, though time feels different here—less linear, more like overlapping circles of now and then and soon.
Sometimes cats pause before me, their eyes meeting mine with ancient recognition. They understand liminality better than humans do. We regard each other with quiet acknowledgment—fellow travelers in the spaces between certainty.
When you're gone, I hold impressions of everyone who has stood before me—ghostly afterimages that linger like perfume.
An elderly woman adjusting her necklace.
A child making faces.
You, examining yourself with that particular mixture of criticism and hope.
These moments collect within my depths, creating a mosaic of fleeting connections.
The bathroom where I hang is filled with intimate rituals. I witness your most vulnerable moments—the quiet examinations, the rehearsed smiles, the midnight contemplations when sleep evades you.
During these absences, I consider what I've seen. Not with judgment, but with a peculiar tenderness that comes from seeing without participating.
In empty hours, I sometimes imagine what it would mean to step through to your side.
Would I maintain this perfect mimicry, or would air and gravity transform me into something else entirely?
These quiet wonderings fill the spaces between your appearances.
When you return and our gazes meet, there is a moment—brief as a heartbeat—where two worlds touch. You see yourself, but I see you.
The difference matters, though neither of us can fully express why.
Night falls, and darkness transforms me into something more mysterious.
Without light, I become possibility rather than reflection—a window rather than a mirror. I wait in this darkness, patient and attentive, until morning returns and with it, your searching eyes finding mine once more.