The Woman in the Mirror

The mirror was spotted with fly dirt and toothpaste ghosts, the kind that never come all the way clean no matter how hard you scrub. That felt about right.

I leaned in close, close enough to smell the iron in the water and the mildew in the walls, and that’s when I saw her — the woman who’d been living inside my skin without asking permission.

Her eyes used to shine, folks used to tell me that. Now they were the color of swamp mud down near the Satilla after a long rain, dead-still, like they’d done give up on moving anywhere. I didn’t flinch. I knew her. I just hated how long it had took me to notice she wasn’t me anymore.

I kept looking around the bathroom like I might’ve dropped something. My shine maybe. A scrap of the girl I was before love started landing with a closed fist. All I found were pieces, little glittering slivers ground down by every hard word, every hand that stayed too long, every night I swallowed pain because silence felt safer than screaming.

Every hit.

Every slap.

Every cruelty that learned my name.

They say when a man finally leaves it ought to feel like freedom. What they don’t say is how the house keeps holding his shape. How your mind replays the sound of the door like a hymn you never asked to learn. He walked out casual as Sunday afternoon, like he hadn’t just shattered me across that linoleum floor.

I felt like one of them old windows in a falling-down house off Highway 82 — paint still clinging, glass long gone, letting every cold thing in.

I didn’t lose myself all at once.

I was wore down slow.

Filed thinner than red clay after a drought.

Ground to dust by loving the wrong kind of man in the wrong kind of dark.

And I stood there in that bathroom, Brantley County dirt still under my nails, wondering if a woman can call her own soul back once it’s scattered through the woods like that.

-marikay