The bathroom mirror fogs over when you shower, and you wipe a clear patch with your palm to shave. I do it too. Same as everyone.
But I stand there longer than I used to. The face looking back is held together by things I now know the actual size of. The warm water running down the drain, pumped up from an aquifer that took ten thousand years to fill. The breath fogging the glass, made of air I have seen edge-on from two hundred miles up.
From there the whole atmosphere is a pale blue line, thinner than the shell of an egg, and everything you have ever inhaled fits inside it.
The person in the mirror does not know this. The person in the mirror is running late, checking a spot on their chin, half annoyed at the light. I recognize him. That was the whole job of a mirror, before: a tool for fixing small problems on a small scale, a way to confirm you are still presentable to the others down here.
I catch my own eyes in the glass now and think: there is exactly one place in the dark where that reflection is possible. Not one country. One planet, and no borders on it that I could see. Every mirror on it is doing this same quiet trick, throwing a person back at themselves so they can carry on.
I wipe the patch. I shave. I try not to make it a thing. But I have started leaving the fog a second longer before I clear it, just to watch it hold my breath in the glass before it fades.