“I’m not talking to you anymore.”

            The words are flat, petulant and grating, scraping against his raw throat and leaving a dull sort of pain behind.

            Light hits the mirror in patches, creating strange waves on its aged surface. In one corner he can see her smile, tremulous and a little fearful, but still there, bobbing like that beam of light on a surface that is a little broken, but might be repaired.

            She hovers just out of reach, a phantom that will never cease to haunt him. He wasn’t lying when he told her that she was the only thing he could see. Even when he looks in the mirror, it is not his own face he sees, but another. His eyes become her hair, glossy and dark and just thick enough for him to run his fingers through. His skin is her eyes, the smudges of dirt on the back of her hands from where she fell in the dirt outside the house, is the rich red-brown of the birthmark on her left breast, the one he shouldn’t have seen, but did, because he was a teenage boy and tall and not at all above looking down her shirt when the opportunity presented itself.

            He sees her everywhere. She is the shadow cast by a stroller left unattended on a street, is the businessman barking orders into his cell phone. There is nothing that does not remind him of her, even in this unfamiliar city where everyone is nameless, faceless, nothing.

            She is something, he thinks. That’s why he can’t escape her.

            His fingers reach out, trace the jaw of his reflection, and he can almost imagine the cool glass under his hand is her skin. This is how she feels now, cold and hard and unnatural. But this mirror is an old friend, and he thinks that maybe he can get used to the idea.

            “Cold and hard isn’t so bad,” he tells the mirror.

            The light winks off his reflected teeth, and he can almost imagine she’s smiling at him.