After our daughter was born, you stopped looking into your reflection.

There would be a pinched expression flitted across your face whenever you caught yourself in the mirror. You'd pause whatever you were doing and straightened slightly—fingers briefly pinched the flesh at your abdomen, fluttered at your own cheeks—before shaking your head and resuming your work. But the pinched expression remained for the whole day, didn't fully go away, even when I held you in my arms and told you You're fine, even when Ally beamed and told you Mommy, you're beautiful. You'd smile in reply, albeit stiffly, as though you couldn't quite convince yourself what we said was true, as though you were still struggled to reconcile reality.

It wasn't exactly like anger or bitterness or apprehension. Just a simple resignation that seeped the life out of you a little, that made you hunched a little in your baggy clothes, that made you looked after the younger female co-workers with a glaze of wistful in your eyes.

I started removing all the mirrors in the house. Putting lids across the glasses above the sink, pulling down the full-body mirrors in our bedroom and hallways in favour of short, portrait convex mirrors, favouring intercept your paths whenever you gazed too long at the mirrors. Sometimes, I'd caught you still chasing after those false images somewhere on the other side of the reflective surfaces—unconsciously tilting your dark phone screen up at your face, tilting the side of your spoon at your frown, staring down the greasy metal pans. I learnt, at those times, the best thing I could do was slowly rotating you and leaning in close until all you could look at was me, at the reflections of yourself in my pupils, through my eyes and not your own distorted, jaded lens. I learnt, at those times, the best thing to say is something more than just You're fine.

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TOTAL WORDCOUNT: 319 WORDS

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(title credited to JDRider's Mirror People)