Dying only to me
The world has become a hall of mirrors, and every reflection carries your shoulders, your particular way of leaning into the wind.
Yesterday, at the corner of 3rd and Main, I saw the exact turn of your head—that dark wave of hair catching the grey afternoon light—and my heart hit my ribs like a trapped bird. I took three fast steps forward, your name already rising like ash in my throat, before the stranger turned around and offered me a face that wasn’t yours. It happens in subway stations, in the blurred windows of passing buses, in the quiet aisles of grocery stores where a man reaches for coffee with hands shaped precisely like the ones that used to trace my collarbone.
They told me you were gone. They gave me papers with official seals, brought me cold water in paper cups, and let me sit in rooms that smelled of ozone and bleached linen. But grief makes a detective out of the broken. Now, every stranger in a dark coat becomes a clue. I watch them from behind newspaper stands and coffee shop windows, searching for the telltale hitch in your left gait, the way you used to shove your hands deep into your pockets when you were deep in thought.
Did you really close your eyes for the last time, or did you just walk out of the frame?
Late at night, when the city quietens down to a low hum, the doubt creeps in, cold and sharp as glass. I wonder if you staged the whole quiet tragedy—a masterclass in vanishing—leaving behind an empty suit and a hollowed-out life just to start fresh under a different sky. I imagine you in some coastal town where nobody knows your name, buying fruit at a morning market, carrying a life that I am no longer allowed to touch. I don’t know which thought is cruelest: that the universe stole you from me in a single, senseless instant, or that you chose to die only to me, leaving me to spend the rest of my days hunting a ghost who is simply living somewhere else.
So I keep walking through these heavy, crowded streets. I scan every coat, every stride, every shadow, doomed to look for you in every man who is not you, waiting for the day one of them finally turns around and smiles.
The repeating dream
He woke with dust in his throat and the cold, unyielding weight of soil pressed behind his eyes, though the bed beneath him was soft and the window showed a blue, indifferent morning. He is a man who died and somehow returned, walking back into the daylight without a single memory to explain the hollow where his heart used to beat. There was no tunnel of light, no sudden revelation—only the quiet, terrifying reality of a second breath he never asked for. He carries his own mortality like an unmarked envelope in his pocket, sealed tight and forever unopened.
In the streets, he moves like a thief in broad daylight, keeping his eyes trained on the cobblestones to avoid the faces of those he used to know. When a woman in a heavy coat calls a name that feels sharp and familiar in the air, he turns away, his pulse spiking with an instinctual, nameless dread. He does not know why he flees from them, only that to stand before them is to invite a ghost into the room. He recognizes their smiles, the curve of their shoulders, the way they laugh, but they do not belong to his waking life; they belong to the nocturnal loop that plays behind his eyelids every night.
To him, his past is not a story, but a single, endless dream trapped on a repeating reel. In it, the same voices murmur the same forgotten promises, the same rain falls against the same windowpane, and the same hand reaches out to touch his cheek just before everything fades to gray. He wanders this second life as an imposter in his own skin, terrified that if he speaks to the people from the dream, the fragile thread holding him to this side of the earth will snap, and he will remember what it felt like to vanish.
Mirror of Darkness
The glass does not reflect the room behind them, nor the weight of the years they spent stumbling through the waking world under separate suns. In the mirror of darkness, there is only an obsidian stillness, thick as velvet and cold as the space between stars, where the living and the dead step forward to face one another at last. Here, stripped of breath and pulse on one side and bone and blood on the other, they look into each other’s eyes and remember the vast, pale corridors of the Interlife. They remember the quiet agreements made before time had a name—the solemn, beautiful pact to split themselves apart, to take up heavy costumes of flesh and forget their origin so they might play out sorrow and joy, betrayal and devotion, in the theater of earth.
The curtain has finally fallen on this act, the scripts burned away by the friction of lived hours, leaving them stranded on opposite shores of the same absolute night. They cannot cross back into the noise of the living, nor can they yet dissolve wholly into the light of the source; for now, they are tethered to this twilight boundary, permitted only to meet in the obsidian glass where shadows lose their shape. Yet there is no grief in the parting, only the slow, dizzying realization of what comes next—the eventual return to the Interlife, where the costumes will be dropped forever and the actors will wake from the play.
Mirror of darkness
Quite enraptured by my own image in a
Mirror of Darkness,
I abandon both reflection and shadow
for a glimpse of the Unknown.
The night offers no refraction other than
the glint of an inner eye:
Yea, the paradox of Blindness is revealed
through discovery of Self alone.
— Adam
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