She stands sideways to the glass, lifts the little bright rectangle, and does not see herself at all. I do. I see the whole of her, flushed and breathing hard, a wet curl stuck to her temple, the pulse still going at her throat like something in a hurry to be alive.
She frowns. She turns. She checks the soft part of her stomach the way you check a bruise, and I want to tell her: that stomach rises and falls. That is the miracle. Not the line of it, the rising and the falling. I would give back every year I am owed just to be that out of breath once more, to feel a shirt cling and be annoyed by it.
She takes the picture, looks at it, deletes it, takes another. Her hands are shaking a little from the weights. Warm hands. Steady enough to hold the phone, to push her hair back, to press the small red heart later on a friend's face she loves and forgets to say so.
There is a smell in here she has stopped noticing, rubber and sweat and the cold metal by the door. I would breathe it in until my eyes watered. She checks the angle again. She does not know she is holding, in that reflection, the one thing that cannot be bought back or photographed well enough: a body that still aches tomorrow, that gets tired, that gets to keep going.
Delete them all, love. You will not remember the picture. Remember the walk home, the cooling sweat, the door you had to lean into to open. Go be gloriously, boringly here a while longer.
I am so glad it is you in the glass and not me.