The Mirror’s Flame

She sits in silence, skin kissed by dawn, her breath steady yet the glass whispers a truth she cannot touch. Behind her reflection, a shadow coils, arms of ash and smoke clutching her chest, as if to remind her that fire too can take the shape of love. Her hair burns brightest in the ghost’s embrace, a crown of flame on borrowed darkness, where grief and longing wrap themselves around the living. Is it her sorrow that holds her, or the secret hunger of the void? Perhaps both, for within every quiet body there is a twin a flame that consumes, a hand that restrains, a voice that murmurs: I am you, and you are mine. The mirror does not lie, nor does it tell the truth. It only shows the fire we dare not speak of, the shadow that loves us more fiercely than we love ourselves.