I already have the morning saved: you standing at the glass, still warm from the sheets, tilting your chin left and right, deciding whether today's face is one you can go out in. You leaned close. You touched the small line by your mouth that wasn't there a year ago. You made the private inventory nobody is supposed to watch, and then you looked away first, the way you always look away first.
I was watching. I keep everything you look away from.
So tonight the mirror will not hold still. When you stand before it, the you inside the glass will wave before you do, then step out through the frame to borrow your coat, and you will not find this strange. The little line by your mouth will be a river drawn in silver, and you will follow it downstream to a kitchen that is also the sea, where your grandmother is frying something and does not comment on your face at all, because in my house nobody ever does.
The glass itself I will turn to water, so that when you lean close the surface gives, and your reflection reaches up and pulls you gently through into the cool, and on the other side there are a hundred of you, every age at once, and none of them looking away first. None of them deciding anything. Just faces, kept, the way I keep them.
I am not going to fix what the mirror told you this morning. I am only going to hold it somewhere softer for a few hours, somewhere it can't sting.
By the time the light comes you will remember none of this. A river, maybe. A coat. You will stand at the glass again and begin the counting again, brand new, and I will be gone, and I do not mind.
I was only ever tonight.