It began with small discrepancies. A flicker of delay when Elya raised her hand to brush back her
hair, her reflection following a fraction of a second too late. A slight asynchrony in the blink of an
eye, as if the woman in the mirror was operating on a different timeline. Nothing dramatic, nothing
she could definitively point to and say: There. That’s wrong.
Just a lingering sense of unease, a feeling that the boundary between herself and her reflection was
growing more permeable by the day.
At first, Elya dismissed these moments as tricks of the light, as the result of too little sleep or too
much caffeine. She had been staying up late reading The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes, trying
to make sense of its fragmented narrative and its uncanny parallels to her own life. It was natural
that her perception might be a little off, her mind playing tricks on her overtired eyes.
But then she noticed other things. The way her reflection sometimes seemed to be wearing clothes
slightly different from what she had put on that morning. A scarf she didn’t own draped around the
mirror-Elya’s neck. A different shade of lipstick on the reflection’s mouth. A hairstyle that was
almost, but not quite, the same as her own.
These discrepancies were so subtle they might have gone unnoticed by someone less observant,
less attuned to the details of her own appearance. But Elya had always been meticulous about
such things, her appearance being one of the few aspects of life she could control completely.
She began to test her reflection, making sudden movements to see if it would follow. Usually it did,
but sometimes there was that slight delay, that moment of lag that suggested the reflection was
not simply mirroring her actions but choosing to imitate them.
One evening, after a particularly long day at the publishing house where she worked as an editor,
Elya stood before the bathroom mirror and deliberately raised her right hand. The reflection raised
its right hand in perfect synchrony. She lowered the hand. The reflection followed suit.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Elya said aloud. “Reflections don’t act independently. This isn’t a fairy tale
or a horror movie.”
In the mirror, she saw her lips move, heard the words emerge from her mouth. Everything normal.
Everything as it should be.
Then, just as she was about to turn away, she thought she saw the reflection smile—a small,
secretive curve of the lips that she herself had not made. She whirled back to face the mirror, heart
pounding.
The reflection looked exactly like her, wearing the same expression of alarm, the same wide-eyed
surprise. No mysterious smile, no sign of independence or otherness.
Elya laughed shakily. “You’re losing it,” she told herself. “Next you’ll be talking to the toaster.”
She slept poorly that night, dreaming of mirrors and reflections, of faces that were almost but not
quite her own watching her from behind glass. In one particularly vivid dream, she stood before a
full-length mirror in a room she didn’t recognize. As she watched, her reflection stepped forward,
pressing its hands against the glass from the other side.
“Let me out,” the reflection mouthed, its expression a mixture of pleading and command. “It’s your
turn to be the reflection.”
Elya woke with a gasp, the dream still vivid in her mind. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky
outside her window. Too unsettled to go back to sleep, she rose and went to the bathroom,
avoiding looking in the mirror as she washed her face and brushed her teeth.
But avoidance could only last so long. Eventually, she had to check her appearance before leaving
for work. Steeling herself, she raised her eyes to the mirror.
What she saw stopped her breath.
The reflection was her—same face, same hair, same pale blue blouse she had put on moments
before. But while Elya stood with her arms at her sides, the reflection had its hands pressed against
the glass, exactly as in her dream. And its expression was not her own wide-eyed shock but a look
of calm assessment, almost satisfaction.
“What are you?” Elya whispered, the words escaping before she could stop them.
The reflection’s lips moved silently, forming words Elya couldn’t decipher. Was it answering her
question? Was it asking one of its own? Or was it simply mimicking the shape of Elya’s words
without understanding their meaning?
Elya raised her hand slowly, cautiously, and touched the mirror. The glass was cool and solid
beneath her fingertips, a tangible barrier between her and whatever was on the other side. The
reflection mirrored her action, its hand aligning with hers, palm to palm with only the glass between
them.
For a moment, Elya thought she felt warmth where their hands met, as if the barrier between them
had thinned, become permeable. Then the sensation was gone, and she was left touching only cold
glass.
She pulled her hand away and stepped back. The reflection did the same, resuming its mimicry of
her movements. Whatever momentary independence it had shown was gone, or at least hidden.
Elya left for work, the encounter leaving her shaken and uncertain. Was she experiencing some sort
of psychological break? Was this a symptom of something medical, perhaps a brain tumor or early- onset dementia? Or was something genuinely inexplicable happening, something that defied
rational explanation?
Throughout the day, she found herself checking her reflection whenever possible—in the mirrored
walls of the elevator, in the polished surface of her computer screen when it went dark, in the
window of her office when the afternoon light struck it just right. Each time, the reflection behaved
exactly as it should, following her movements without delay or divergence.
By the time she returned home that evening, Elya had almost convinced herself that the morning’s
incident had been a dream, a hallucination born of stress and lack of sleep. She moved through her
evening routine with deliberate normalcy, as if by performing the actions of a stable person, she
might become one.
She spent the rest of the day avoiding reflective surfaces. She called in sick to work. She closed all
the blinds, blocking out the windows that might show her distorted image. She covered the
television screen with a blanket when it was turned off. She even turned her phone face-down on
the table, afraid of what might look back at her from its darkened screen.
Hours passed in this careful avoidance of her own image. As evening approached, hunger finally
drove her from her bedroom. In the kitchen, she caught a glimpse of movement in the window
above the sink. Night had fallen, and the glass had become a mirror, reflecting the illuminated
interior of her apartment.
Except what she saw wasn’t a reflection at all. It was herself—or someone who looked exactly like
her—standing on the other side of the glass, looking in. The other Elya raised her hand and pressed
it against the window, palm flat, as if in greeting. Or farewell.
Elya fled, back to her bedroom, where she huddled beneath the covers until sunrise. When morning
came, she forced herself to confront the bathroom mirror again, half-expecting to find it empty, her
reflection having departed for good.
Instead, she saw herself—normal, synchronized, following her every movement exactly as it
should. She exhaled slowly, relief washing over her. Had it all been a dream? A hallucination
brought on by stress or lack of sleep?
Then she noticed the words, written in the fog of the mirror, visible only because of her breath:
“I was never here.”
The handwriting was her own
For the next week, Elya existed in a state of heightened vigilance, watching her reflections for any
sign of independence or divergence. She spent hours before the bathroom mirror, conducting
experiments—making sudden movements, speaking in mid-gesture, turning away and spinning
back quickly to catch the reflection unawares.
Most of the time, the reflection behaved exactly as it should, a perfect mimicry of her own
movements. But occasionally, she caught it in moments of discrepancy—a hand that moved a
second before hers did, a smile that lingered after her own had faded, a look in the eyes that
suggested the reflection was watching her rather than simply showing her image back to herself.
These moments were so fleeting that Elya began to doubt her own perception. Was she seeing
what was actually happening, or was her mind creating patterns where none existed? She had
always prided herself on her rationality, her ability to see the world clearly and without distortion.
Now, that clarity was clouded, her perception unreliable.
She considered seeking help—a therapist, perhaps, or a neurologist. But what would she say? “My
reflection is acting independently”? “I think the woman in the mirror is becoming separate from
me”? Any such claim would likely be met with a diagnosis of psychological disturbance,
medication, perhaps even hospitalization if she insisted too strongly on the reality of what she was
experiencing.
Instead, Elya turned to The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes, hoping to find in its pages some
clue, some precedent for what was happening to her. The book had already demonstrated an
uncanny ability to reflect her own experiences; perhaps it contained answers as well as parallels.
She reread it from its truncated beginning, paying particular attention to any mention of mirrors or
reflections. There were several such references, but one passage in particular caught her attention:
“She had always thought of identity as something solid and singular, a fixed point around which the
world revolved. But now she understood that it was fluid, multiple, a collection of reflections rather
than a single, definitive image. Each person who had known her carried a different version of her in
their memory; each interaction created a new facet of her self. She was not one woman but many,
existing simultaneously in the minds of all who had encountered her.”
Elya read and reread this passage, considering its implications. If identity was indeed multiple, if
she existed in different versions in the memories and perceptions of others, then perhaps what she
was seeing in the mirror was not a supernatural occurrence but a manifestation of some deeper
psychological truth. Perhaps the “other Elya” was a part of herself that had become detached, a
facet of her identity that had gained a kind of autonomy.
This idea, while still disturbing, was at least comprehensible, a framework within which she could
understand her experiences. It didn’t fully explain the physical discrepancies she had observed—
the reflection that moved independently, the message written in the fogged mirror—but it provided
a starting point, a way to think about what was happening without immediately assuming she was
losing her mind.
That night, Elya dreamed again of mirrors. In the dream, she stood in a circular room, its walls
made entirely of reflecting glass. In each section, she saw a different version of herself—Elya as a
child, Elya as an old woman, Elya dressed for a wedding she had never had, Elya in mourning
clothes she had never worn.
As she turned slowly in place, taking in these various iterations of herself, she noticed that one
section of the mirror was empty. It showed the room, the other reflections, but not Elya herself, as
if she were invisible or absent from that particular perspective.
She approached this empty section, curious and a little afraid. As she drew near, a figure began to
form in the glass—not a reflection of Elya, but a woman who resembled her closely while being
distinctly other. This woman had Elya’s features but arranged slightly differently, as if someone had
described Elya to a sculptor who had then created a likeness from that description, accurate in
general but divergent in specific details.
The woman in the mirror smiled, a gentle expression that nonetheless sent a chill through Elya.
“There you are,” the woman said, her voice similar to Elya’s but with a different cadence, a different
music. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?” Elya asked, the question emerging as a whisper.
“I’m the part of you that you’ve been leaving behind,” the woman said. “Every time you say goodbye
to someone, every time you close a door or end a chapter, you leave a piece of yourself behind. I
am the collection of those pieces, the mosaic of your abandoned selves.”
“What do you want?” Elya asked, sensing that this encounter, dream though it might be, was
significant in ways she didn’t yet understand.
“To be acknowledged,” the woman said. “To be integrated. Or, failing that, to be set free.”
Before Elya could respond, the dream shifted, the circular room dissolving into darkness, the
mirrors and their reflections fading like smoke. She woke with the woman’s words still ringing in her
ears: To be acknowledged. To be integrated. Or, failing that, to be set free.The message seemed clear enough, but Elya was uncertain how to act on it. How did one
acknowledge or integrate a rebellious reflection? How did one set free a part of oneself that had
already achieved a disturbing degree of autonomy?
She rose and went to the bathroom, determined to confront her reflection directly, to engage with it
as if it were indeed a separate entity with its own awareness and agenda.
The mirror showed her as she was—tousled from sleep, eyes shadowed from too many nights of
disturbed rest. The reflection followed her movements precisely as she stepped closer to the glass,
studying her own face with critical
The mirror showed her as she was—tousled from sleep, eyes shadowed from too many nights of
disturbed rest. The reflection followed her movements precisely as she stepped closer to the glass,
studying her own face with critical attention.
“I acknowledge you,” Elya said, feeling slightly foolish but pressing on nonetheless. “I recognize
that you are part of me, the accumulation of all I’ve left behind. I’m ready to integrate you, to make
us whole again.”
The reflection mouthed the same words, no sign of independence or separate consciousness
visible in its features. Elya sighed, disappointed despite herself. Had she really expected the
reflection to respond, to step out of the mirror and embrace her in some dramatic scene of
reunification?
She turned away, ready to dismiss the entire episode as the product of an overactive imagination
combined with too little sleep. But as she did, she caught a flicker of movement in her peripheral
vision, a sense that the reflection had not turned with her but had remained facing forward,
watching her departure.
Elya whirled back to face the mirror, heart pounding. The reflection matched her movement
exactly, showing the same expression of alarm, the same defensive posture. No sign of
independence, no evidence of otherness.
She exhaled slowly, trying to calm her racing heart. “You’re imagining things,” she told herself
firmly. “The reflection is just a reflection. There’s no ‘other Elya’ trying to communicate with you or
escape from the mirror.”
She spoke the words with conviction, wanting to believe them, needing to believe them. But as she
turned once more to leave the bathroom, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection was
watching her go, its eyes following her with an attention that contained both curiosity and hunger.
In the days that followed, Elya developed a new routine. Each morning, she would stand before the
bathroom mirror and speak to her reflection as if it were a separate entity. Sometimes she would
tell it about her plans for the day, sometimes about memories from her childhood, sometimes
about her fears and hopes for the future. It was like having a silent therapist, one who wore her face
but whose eyes held a depth of attention she rarely experienced from actual people.
“I know you’re there,” she would say. “I know you’re listening. I’m not afraid of you. I want to
understand what you are, what you want from me.”
The reflection never responded in any overt way. It matched her movements, mimicked her
expressions, followed the rhythm of her speech with its silent mouthing of the same words. But
sometimes, Elya thought she detected a difference in its eyes, a quality of attention that suggested
not just mimicry but comprehension.
She began to leave notes on the mirror, written with her fingertip in the steam after her shower.
Simple messages: “Good morning.” “I see you.” “Who are you?” Each time, she would wipe the
mirror clean before leaving the bathroom, and each time, she would return to find a response
written in the same medium, visible only when the steam from her next shower fogged the glass.
“I am here.” “I have always seen you.” “I am the space between who you are and who you pretend to
be.”
These exchanges, cryptic though they were, gave Elya a strange sense of comfort. Whatever was
happening—whether it was supernatural or psychological, whether the “other Elya” was an actual
entity or a manifestation of some aspect of her own psyche—at least it was a dialogue now, a
communication rather than just a series of unsettling observations.
She found herself looking forward to these silent conversations, to the brief moments of
connection with something or someone that understood her in ways no one else ever had. It was
like having an invisible companion, a secret sharer who knew her thoughts before she spoke them,
who saw the parts of herself she kept hidden from the world.
Then, one evening, everything changed.
Elya had come home late from work, exhausted after a day of meetings and deadlines. She had
barely glanced at her reflection as she washed her face and brushed her teeth, too tired for their
usual exchange. But as she was about to leave the bathroom, a movement in the mirror caught her
eye.
She turned back, expecting to see nothing unusual, just her own tired face looking back at her.
Instead, she saw the reflection smiling—a small, secretive smile that she herself was not making.
Elya froze, heart pounding. The reflection’s smile widened, as if it was pleased by her shock, by the
proof that she could see its independence.
“What do you want?” Elya whispered, the question emerging as a breath more than a sound.
The reflection’s lips moved, forming words that Elya couldn’t quite make out. She stepped closer to
the mirror, straining to understand.
“I want what was promised,” the reflection seemed to say. “I want to be free.”
Before Elya could respond, the reflection raised its hand and pressed it against the glass from the
other side. Its expression was expectant, almost demanding.
Without fully understanding why, Elya raised her own hand and pressed it against the mirror,
aligning her palm with the reflection’s. The glass was cold at first, then warm, then hot enough that
she nearly pulled away. But something—curiosity, courage, or perhaps a deeper recognition—kept
her hand in place.
The surface beneath her palm began to soften, to yield, like ice melting under persistent pressure.
Elya felt her hand sink into the mirror, not breaking it but passing through it, as if the solid barrier
had become permeable, a membrane rather than a wall.
On the other side, she felt another hand grasp hers—warm, solid, undeniably real. The reflection
tugged gently, as if inviting her to step through completely, to cross over into whatever space
existed on the other side of the mirror.
Elya hesitated, a moment of rational fear breaking through the strange dream-like quality of the
experience. What was she doing? What would happen if she allowed herself to be pulled through?
Where would she go, and would she be able to return?
In that moment of hesitation, the connection broke. The glass solidified again, becoming once
more an impenetrable barrier. The reflection withdrew its hand, its expression changing from
invitation to disappointment, then to a cool assessment that made Elya shiver.
“You’re not ready,” the reflection mouthed, the words clear enough this time. “But you will be.
Soon.”
Then, as Elya watched in horror and fascination, the reflection turned and walked away, moving
deeper into whatever space existed behind the mirror, until it vanished from view, leaving Elya
staring at an empty mirror that showed only the bathroom behind her, not her own image.
She backed away, unable to process what she had just witnessed. The rational part of her mind
insisted that what she had seen was impossible, a hallucination or a dream. Mirrors didn’t become permeable; reflections didn’t act independently; there was no space “behind” a mirror where an
alternative version of oneself could exist.
And yet, she had felt the other hand grasp hers. She had felt the glass yield and soften. And now
she stood before a mirror that reflected everything in the room except her own presence, as if she
had somehow become invisible or nonexistent from the mirror’s perspective.
Elya spent that night sleeping on her couch, unwilling to return to the bathroom with its now-empty
mirror. In the morning, forcing herself to be rational, she returned to confront her fear. The mirror
was normal again, reflecting her pale, exhausted face exactly as it should. No sign of the
independent reflection, no evidence of the strange encounter.
Had she dreamed it? Had exhaustion and stress caused her to hallucinate the entire episode? Elya
wanted to believe this rational explanation, but a deeper part of her knew what she had
experienced was real, whatever “real” might mean in this context.
She went to work, moved through her day with a kind of mechanical efficiency, returned home. The
mirror remained normal, reflecting only what stood before it, nothing more. Days passed in this
ordinary way, until Elya began to wonder if the entire strange episode had been nothing more than a
peculiarly vivid dream or a temporary break with reality that had now resolved itself.
Then, a week after the encounter with the independent reflection, Elya woke in the middle of the
night to find a woman sitting at the foot of her bed—a woman with her face, her hair, her body, but
whose eyes held a quality of otherness, of separate identity, that was unmistakable.
“You’re not dreaming,” the woman said, using Elya’s voice but with a different cadence, a different
music. “And I’m not a hallucination. I am you, or part of you, the collection of all the pieces you’ve
left behind each time you’ve said goodbye. And now I’m here to say goodbye to you.”
“What does that mean?” Elya asked, her voice steady despite the surreal nature of the
conversation.
“It means I’m leaving,” the other Elya said. “I’m taking what’s mine and going. You won’t see me
again, not in mirrors, not in dreams, not anywhere. I’ll be gone, and so will all the parts of yourself
that I’m taking with me.”
“What parts?” Elya asked, a chill running through her at the words.
The other Elya smiled, a sad expression that held neither malice nor triumph, only a kind of
resigned determination. “The parts you don’t use. The parts you’ve forgotten or rejected. The
capacity for joy you had as a child. The ability to love without reservation. The willingness to believe in things beyond the rational, the explicable. All the magic and mystery you’ve left behind in your
pursuit of control and predictability.”
Elya felt a surge of protest. “Those are mine,” she said. “You can’t take them.”
“They were yours,” the other Elya corrected gently. “But you abandoned them, piece by piece,
goodbye by goodbye. Now they’re mine, and I’m taking them somewhere they’ll be valued,
somewhere they can flourish rather than wither from neglect.”
“Where?” Elya asked, unable to conceive of a “where” that existed for this other version of herself.
“Elsewhere,” the other Elya said, the word carrying echoes of the nameless town Elya had visited.
“A place that exists in the spaces between, in the gaps and interstices of what you call reality. A
place for all the forgotten and abandoned parts of people, all the discarded possibilities, all the
roads not taken.”
As she spoke, the other Elya seemed to shimmer, to become less solid, more a suggestion of
presence than an actual physical being. Elya reached out, trying to grasp her arm, to hold her there
until she could understand fully what was happening, what she was losing.
Her hand passed through the other Elya’s form as if through smoke, encountering nothing solid.
The other Elya smiled again, this time with a touch of pity.
“Goodbye, Elya,” she said, her voice already fading, distant as an echo. “I was never here.”
And then she was gone, leaving Elya alone in the darkness, reaching for something that had never
been tangible enough to hold.
In the morning, Elya woke with the encounter still vivid in her mind. Had it been a dream? A
continuation of whatever strange phenomena had been occurring with her reflection? Or
something else entirely, a symbolic representation of some psychological process she was
undergoing?
She rose and went to the bathroom, approaching the mirror with caution. Her reflection looked
back at her, mirroring her movements exactly, showing no signs of independence or otherness.
Normal. Predictable. Safe.
And yet, as Elya studied her own face, she noticed subtle differences. Her eyes seemed duller
somehow, less alive. Her expressions felt stiffer, as if certain muscles had forgotten how to move
in particular ways. When she tried to smile, the result was a mechanical upturning of the lips, a
simulation of joy rather than the real thing.
The other Elya had taken something with her when she left—something essential, something Elya
hadn’t even realized she still possessed until it was gone. The capacity for spontaneous joy. The ability to be surprised by beauty. The willingness to believe in magic and mystery. All the bright,
shining parts of herself that she had gradually set aside in her pursuit of a controlled, predictable
life.
Elya placed her hand against the mirror, not expecting it to yield as it had before, just needing the
cool solidity of the glass, the reassurance of a barrier that remained intact. The reflection mimicked
her action perfectly, its hand aligning with hers, palm to palm with the glass between them.
“Come back,” Elya whispered, not sure if she was addressing the independent reflection, the other
Elya who had visited in the night, or some part of herself that had been slowly disappearing for
years before any of these strange occurrences began. “Please come back. I need you.”
But the mirror remained just a mirror, the reflection just a reflection, and Elya just a woman
standing alone in her bathroom, mourning a loss she couldn’t fully articulate, saying goodbye to a
part of herself she hadn’t known was there until it was gone.