When I stand before the mirror,
the world falls silent.
It doesn’t show me skin, or lips, or hair—
it drags me into the prisons of my eyes.
There, behind the trembling surface of their shine,
I see the graves of nights I never spoke about.
I see the unspilled blood of tears
that dried before they could fall.
Every glance becomes a story,
every shadow in my gaze a scar.
When I watch myself,
the reflection whispers of storms—
the kind that never left a trace on the outside,
but tore apart every corner within.
There are words I swallowed whole,
they float in the dark water of my stare;
there are screams that curled back into silence,
lodged deep behind my pupils,
waiting, waiting—
never free.
No one knows.
No one will ever know
how many nights I was shattered
but smiled at the daylight anyway.
No one will ever read
the heavy scripture carved across the surface of my soul,
except me—
when I dare to meet my own reflection.
And so I look,
and my eyes confess what my mouth cannot.
They show me the ruins I carry,
the wars I lost alone,
the weight of sorrow
that has learned to masquerade as ordinary.
Every tear I ever buried
lives still in the shimmer of my stare—
a reminder that pain does not vanish,
it only hides,
behind a fragile shine of brown, of black, of hazel,
behind the veil of light that blinds others.
The mirror is cruel—
it makes me face myself,
it strips away my disguise,
it hands me back the pain I thought I left behind.
Yet the mirror is merciless—
it does not let me escape.
It binds me to the ruins I carry,
forcing me to drown again and again
in the weight of what I cannot undo.
There is no release in its glass,
only the reminder that my eyes are graves,
that the storms inside me
were never meant to pass.
And so I look, and I see
pain—
a language only my reflection understands.