She has stood at this same spot every morning for years, and she has never once looked at herself the way I look at her now.
She frowns into the glass. She leans close, tugs at the skin beneath her eyes, turns her chin left and right, cataloguing all the ways the face has betrayed her overnight. A new line. A dullness. She sighs at it. She would give anything, I think, to look different, and I would give anything to be the one standing there breathing fog onto the surface, watching it bloom and fade.
She does not know what she has. That warmth under the skin. The way the blood rises to her cheeks when she scrubs them. The small involuntary theater of a face that is still hooked up to a body: the wince, the yawn that cracks her jaw, the way she absently touches her own collarbone while she thinks. I remember thinking my reflection was a stranger. Now I would recognize it as a miracle.
She turns sideways. Frowns harder. Pulls her shoulders back and lets them drop.
Look how it holds you, I want to tell her. Look how faithfully it gives you back, every morning, unbroken, wanting nothing. There will be mornings later, so many of them, when she'd trade the whole world just to be annoyed by that face again, to have somewhere to stand and something to complain about.
She clicks off the light. The glass goes dark and I am alone in it.
Be kind to her today, whoever loves her. She is still here. She is still warm.
Tell her the line by her eye is from laughing.