We talked for two hours. I told her what I thought, which was that she should go, and she told me what she thought, which was that she was afraid the going would make the distance permanent, and I told her the thing my mother had told me on a morning I still thought about: make sure you know what you’re walking toward, not just what you’re walking away from.
She was quiet for a long time after that.
“I didn’t know you said things like that,” she said.
“I’m learning,” I said.
She took the job. She left in January. We talk more now than we did when she was twenty minutes by train — something about the formal distance made the informal closeness easier, which was the kind of paradox I had been too busy to notice while I was living inside it.
I still check the mirror every morning.
Most mornings it is normal. But sometimes — not often, not on any schedule I have been able to chart — it does something small. A tilt of the head. A hand raised briefly, not in urgency now but in something that reads more like acknowledgement. Like the nod you give a person you know well when you pass them in the street and there isn’t time to stop.
I have come to understand that the mirror was my mother’s for fifty years before it was mine.
I think she learned its patterns the way I am learning them. I think she understood, by the end, what it was trying to tell her and when to listen. I think she left it to me deliberately — not just as an object, not just as a memory, but as a practice.
Pay attention. You’re about to miss something.
I don’t know how many things it will show me. I don’t know whether what I see will always be in time, or whether some of it will arrive as I told myself too late, which is the thing you tell yourself when you missed the window and can’t face the alternative.
What I know is that this morning I stood in front of it and the reflection looked at me with my mother’s particular expression — the one that meant there is something I need you to see — and then looked deliberately at the calendar.
I have marked the date it pointed to.
I am paying attention this time.
I intend to keep doing that.
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