Night Mirrors

I think getting to know myself through your eyes has allowed me to expand more than I’d known before - like I can take deeper breaths and feel the air fill every part of me and know that I am here; a solid thing that can hold itself together and contain a gust of wind without floating away.

And yet, I’m still a bit afraid of mirrors in the dark. I avoid any passing glance at one for fear of catching the flicker of a ghost in the reflection; a trick of the light real enough to stop a heartbeat. But I can face you underneath the covers while the imagined threats of night swirl around us in the moonlight, our bed an oasis in the shadows. I can stand to look into your eyes and find myself staring back and not look away, your gaze the only mirror I can handle with the lights off.

I think about all the hoops we’ve jumped through to get to this point - all the nights I spent hoping beyond reason that we might share something like this one day; something tender and our own, built over quiet years full of things we’d left unsaid for so long, the words solid in the air, waiting to be spoken. And here we are now, on a night when I can graze your cheek with a lazy finger, and feel your breathing slow; on a night when I can watch with half-lidded eyes while yours gently close, and rest easy in the warm knowledge that my face was the last thing you saw before drifting off to sleep.

I can feel the space between us grow, between consciousness and unconsciousness, so I close my eyes and try to match my breathing with yours, hoping to get close to you again. In the quiet that follows, I wonder what you made of me in that last sleep-glazed look. I’d like to think you were memorizing the moonlit landscape of my face to recreate in a dream somewhere, and the thought makes me smile. And I realize I am happy because I feel safe, and I am no longer afraid of the ghosts I might find when I look into your eyes and see myself.