Human beings… are a little bit like mirrors.

When two of them come face to face–when they look into each others’ eyes, trade words, gestures and expressions–they begin to reflect one another, to adapt and adjust in tiny, imperceptible steps until finally their rhythms match. Give it enough time and one’s colors start to bleed into the other’s; a certain harmony develops, a recursive loop of reflections upon reflections. You could stare into it for eternity and never find an origin point; just an endless tunnel where light itself goes to die.

It happens so naturally, so quickly, that it could only be the product of millions of years of evolution, encoded into their very genes. They must not even realize it, just the same as they breathe without any conscience of it.

I am a broken mirror.

They look at me expecting to see themselves reflected back. But all I can give them is an ugly, distorted picture, a mockery of their own image, so misshapen it’s barely recognizable.

I can tell–I’ve learned to tell–when they realize it, the moment it dawns on them what it is they are facing. The look in their eyes changes in an instant.

Of course they try to look past it, to hide their discomfort and to find some common ground. People are kind, after all, and they are patient. And yet it only makes me feel even more distant.

I wish that I could give them what they want. I really do, so badly that it hurts, like a jagged knife being driven straight into my gut. But you can’t fix a broken mirror, can you? The pieces won’t ever fit each other quite like they were meant to.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw her that day. In an instant she was there, like some ghost flickering in from another plane of existence, with her gaze set on me.

I was afraid. The way she looked at me was… different. Her eyes betrayed none of that usual expectation, but they glowed like smoldering fire searching for fuel to burn through.

They pressed in on me like a vise, prodding and probing. Part of me wanted to run away right then and there. But I didn’t.

I must have figured burning alive would hurt less than dying, alone, in the cold.

Even after everything that happened, after all that we went through together, I couldn’t tell what she saw in me; why she would keep coming back, again and again, no matter how much I stumbled and faltered. I didn’t have the courage, or the words, to ask.

Until today I would have called her an unsolved mystery. No–an unexplained phenomenon. A force of nature I could only helplessly witness.

“Tomori.”

Outside, the last few straggling sparrows are still singing away, as summer draws its last breath under autumn’s suffocating embrace.

She is in my room, and I am splayed out with my back to the hardwood floor. Her hands are pinning down my wrists, and for the first time I am looking her straight in the eyes.

One blue, one amber. In them, I see my own reflection.

She is a broken mirror, too, I realize. I can finally see the cracks running over her.

They are different from mine; denser in parts and sparser in others, all cutting through the polished-glass surface of her being in a distinct, irreplicable pattern.

And past them I see my own, and the way they mix together is so beautiful it makes a terrible chill run down my spine.

She draws nearer. I breathe in and close my eyes.