Between the Mirrors

It was not age, precisely.
Not the arithmetic of candles guttering in successive rooms.
Not the calendar turning its thin, indifferent pages.

It was visibility.
Relevance.
The small, humiliating hope of being chosen.

In youth the world is prodigal with reflections.
Shop windows return your outline.
Voices answer before you finish speaking.
Even grief arrives as spectacle,
costumed and lit,
persuaded of its own importance.

One moves through corridors of echo
and mistakes echo for affirmation.

Then the glass grows taciturn.
The corridor lengthens.
The echo thins to a breath.

Silence, when it gathers in the corners,
resembles erasure.

Yet what was it we desired?
Novelty, perhaps.
The flattering accident of freshness.
Utility, which passes for love
in rooms governed by transaction.
Beauty, which reflects the beholder
more faithfully than the beheld.

These are currencies, not values.

There is a season when value migrates inward,
withdraws from the market of glances
to a quieter treasury.
Sparkle yields to gravity.
Applause to consequence.

The room no longer turns.
But when you speak,
the air registers the disturbance.

Grief attends this migration.
It is the grief of exchange rates collapsing,
of finding one’s former coinage refused
at the newer gate.

And beneath the grief
a whisper, thin as wind in a stairwell:

If I am no longer who I was,
who summons me now?

But whispers are not oracles.
They are drafts through unsettled walls.
The ground shifts.
Identity, a scaffold, is dismantled.
One stands among beams and dust,
mistaking reconstruction for ruin.

There is a paradox in the long afternoon of life.
Desire diffuses.
Need condenses.

The circle narrows.
Its circumference burns more brightly.

Youth attracts.
Maturity anchors.

Between these economies you stand,
between mirrors that no longer answer
and a silence not yet learned.

Do not mistake the interval for extinction.
Distillation is not disappearance.
The spirit, reduced, acquires density.

This quiet is not erasure.
It is concentration.

You are not dissolving into absence.
You are the hidden fire
that does not blaze
yet alters the temperature of the air around it.

The flame is no longer spectacle.
It is heat without display.

And the ember
has not gone out.