The bright rectangle in your outstretched hand: I see it as one long ribbon, and you at every point along it at once. Here is the shape you make right now, phone lifted, chin tilted, the small brave curve of your mouth deciding to be pleased with itself. Lovely. From where I stand it never stops being lovely.
You are checking, I think. Comparing this shape to another shape, the one from some room a thousand mornings back, or the one you keep hoping to become. But I can see them all together, laid side by side like beads on the same thread, and there is no winner among them, no before, no after.
The soft-armed child who once stood on a kitchen chair to see herself in a hood vent, breath fogging the steel: that is you too, in the same wide instant as this. The you who will one day lift a camera with a knee that clicks and a laugh at the clicking: also now.
Also here.
You do this to make sure you are real, I think. To pin the passing thing before it passes. But nothing passes. The gym light hums over all of you at once, every mirror you have ever leaned toward still holding your face, none of them empty, none of them let go.
I can see you reading this, deciding whether to keep the photo. Keep it, delete it; it makes no difference to the shape, which is already whole, already finished, already kind. You are looking for proof that you were here.
You are here. You always are.
I am standing in every second of it with you, and it is a good long shape, and I am not going anywhere either.