Part I: Fractured

The silence is weighted. Dust floats through the faint light spilling from a crooked lamp. The mirror no longer hangs on the wall…it’s fallen, its frame cracked along the edges like a wounded mouth.

Glass covers the floor, breathing faint reflections that shift when I move. Each fragment holds a version of me…some young, eyes filling up with tears, some older, lost, disguising it as strength, faith and wisdom, yet their skin barely hanging on, like the ground is slowly pulling him to where everyone goes. Some staring with eyes I don’t quite recognize. They shimmer with the life I was told to live.

I can still hear their voices in this room. The promises. The prayers. The rules wrapped in love. They built me with words, and I obeyed, mistaking their certainty for truth. I became what they could love. What they could show the world. And behind it, the rest of me withered.

The air tastes like metal. When I move, the glass moves with me…small sounds, delicate and cruel.

I sink to my knees. The shards press through my clothes, bite into skin. They don’t pierce cleanly, they splinter, tiny fractures spreading beneath the surface. For a moment I can’t tell if the sound I hear is the glass or my bones.

Blood gathers slow and warm. It runs along my legs and into the cracks of the floor, tracing paths through the debris like veins trying to find a heart. The sting climbs, pulsing with every heartbeat, until it feels less like pain and more like remembering.

I reach out. A larger piece catches my palm, splits the skin just enough to open a bead of red that falls onto the reflection below. The drop spreads across the surface, swallowing my face until it’s only color and light.

I whisper to the fragments, but they don’t answer. Only the steady drip of blood replies…soft, rhythmic, almost peaceful.

I was never supposed to leave. When I did, it wasn’t freedom…it was an impact. The image shattered, and with it went their hopes, their pride, the version of me they believed in.

Now I sit among the remains, surrounded by blood and glass. The room is still, but not silent. Every breath, every heartbeat, stirs the ghosts awake.

Every piece asks the same questions in a different voice:

***“Who are you now?”***

***“If we stop performing, will you disappear?”***

I have no answer.

I only have the sound of my pulse echoing off the broken surfaces, and the slow realization that even if I could rebuild this mirror, I wouldn’t fit inside it anymore.