What the Mirror Kept

Here lies the girl who once ran barefoot through summers that belonged to her alone, before she learned to make herself small enough to fit inside another's disappointment.

Mourn her, the one who laughed without permission, who held opinions like bouquets in both hands, before the slow erosion of his silences carved canyons where her confidence had stood.

She gave him years the way stone gives itself to rushing waters, not knowing it was wearing, not knowing that the tenderness he'd promised was currency he'd spend on someone else.

And there were others. There is always someone else for men who need a mirror and a shadow both, a wife to hold the house like Atlas holds the sky, a lover for the self he'd rather be.

Forgiveness came not from grace but from depletion, in the surrender of a soul too worn to fight. She learned to read his moods like weather systems, to dress for storms that had no season here.

What dies in such a marriage is not love, for love had already fled by the second year. What dies is the original self, the girl who thought her voice was something worth the hearing.

Grieve her freckled nose. Grieve her untamed laugh. Grieve for every door she closed because he couldn't bear them open. Grieve the friendships thinned by his suspicion. Grieve the poems she stopped believing she could write.

She left, eventually, the silenced always do, and walked out remembering, slowly, who she was before him, sifting through the rubble for what still resembled the woman she'd been becoming.

Let this be her elegy and her rising both: the mourning of a youth burned at a wrong altar, and somewhere past the grieving, a door, with her own hand on the handle, her own key.

She is not what was taken. She is what remains. She is what learned, at last, to call itself her name.