Phantom Glass

My mind replays the world like a film set on rewind—
each step, a loop of what if, each breath a rehearsal
for the script no one’s written. My thoughts, a river
of should have, could have eroding their own banks.

I wear my skin like secondhand shadows,
all blemishes and unspoken apologies.
My voice, a fragile bridge—
each syllable a crack in the wood,
each pause a fear of collapse.

I am glass.
I am the tear that trembles on the edge of itself,
doubled in the mirror’s unyielding eye.
My hairline, a question mark in the fog of my youth,
my face a map of pittances and valleys
I refuse to let dry.

To be disliked is to drown in a room of my own silence.
So I bend, I fold, I become the yes
that swallows the no.
I’d carve my name into the ocean
before I’d etch dissent into the world.

Mirrors are traitors.
They never show the self I sculpt in secret—
a face unbruised by my thoughts,
a body unchained to the weight of not enough.
Instead, they return the liturgy of my failures:
a forehead too low, a chin too soft,
an absence of light where I once dared to flicker.

When the night opens its mouth to swallow me whole,
I press my palms to the glass,
begging for a reflection that isn’t mine.
But the mirror only weeps with me—
a silvered pool of all I could never be.

And in the morning, the tears calcify like old vows,
leaving salt-circles round my eyes,
and the question:
"What if the star isn’t in the sky,
but in the shaking of a hand,
unseen,
alive, mine?"