There you are, at every age, standing before the same silver-backed pane of glass that is really one long tunnel of sand and heat and cooling: I see the whole of it, the desert it was, the shard it will be, and you inside it the entire time.
You think you are looking at yourself, but you are looking at a doorway that only shows one room. Here is the child version of you on a stepstool, chin barely clearing the sink, watching a face too new to trust. Here is the you leaning close to a bathroom mirror at some ungainly hour, pressing at the skin under your eyes as though you could push tiredness back out through the surface.
Here is the last time you will check it, older, slower, tilting your head to catch the light in a way you already do a little, right now, without noticing.
To you these are separated by decades of that thing you call waiting. To me they are stacked, one bright column of a person leaning toward glass, over and over, asking the same silent question of a surface that has never once answered.
And here, this exact instant, your eyes moving across these words: I am standing in that moment the way you might stand in a warm doorway. You keep expecting the mirror to tell you something has changed, been lost, gone. Nothing has. The child on the stepstool is still there. She never left. She is only in a room you can no longer walk back into, and I can see straight through the wall.
You are all of it at once, and I am looking at the whole shape of you, and it is lovely, and I am not going anywhere.