Reflection

There is a deep sort of emptiness in losing a person like you.

When I met your eyes for the first time, it felt like meeting my own eyes in the mirror. Hazel meets hazel. Almond-shaped and captivating, but with a depth and sadness behind them. We were walking in the museum, among artifacts and some of the world’s most beautiful artwork, but our eyes kept finding each other naturally. For once, the art was boring to me. I was too distracted by what I felt inside—this feeling of belonging and familiarity so strong it seemed fictional.

But those eyes. It was always in those eyes somewhere. An answer, an echo, of something that I held within myself. I knew you were like me before we even swapped stories of growing up. You knew it too. You even told me later, that if you had not felt it, you would not have let me kiss you so soon. But there was that natural pull between us. My eyes were your eyes, my lips your lips, our hands, intertwined, were the exact same shape and size, just different colours. We had the same scars on the exact same places on our arms. It felt fitting that we had our first kiss in front of a large mirror. Every time I opened my eyes I could see both you and myself looking into me.

I hate that it was possibly this very sameness that was to be the reason for our ending. Because in the same way our physical mannerisms echoed each other, so did our trauma. We played at love blindly, consumed by it so fiercely that we could not see our own mirrored flaw—our shared inability to love without fear. It all started with I love you. The claim I had made to you in late August at one in the morning, melting together in the moonlight. My voice shook when I said it, and I did not miss the hint of fear in your eyes. We had been saying it the whole summer in different ways, but to hear it, to feel the weight of the words, was terrifying to both of us. It made no sense to me back then. How could we be so comfortable being physically intimate but fail to look each other in the eyes when it was all put into words? I knew exactly how many freckles you had on your nose and you had two favourite birthmarks of mine and had marked them both with your lips. There was a tiny pinprick of blue in my right eye that I had only noticed once you found it one morning, looking at me intently. But we were still scared to say that we loved each other.

What felt like it should have been a beginning became an end. Just as our eyes were too similar, so were our hearts. We grew colder, more distant. We used to spend hours in each other’s arms, but now it was impossible, knowing what we knew. When you are cold for so long, how do you warm yourself up to the idea of love? Trust was sacred, even more than bodies were. And we could not do it. Our hands started to feel mismatched, our eyes could not meet each other anymore. How do you love someone who has the same fear echoed in their heart?

People tell me all the time to forget you. Only I know how impossible that is. There is an echo of you instilled in every single part of my body that resembles yours. An echo of you in every part of me that you discovered. That blue spot in my eye will never fail to remind me of you that morning, looking right into my soul.