Persephone

It starts slowly, with the change of the seasons.

You look in the mirror, brushing your teeth, and think, don't your eyes look so different in this early morning light. You allow yourself another moment of interest in their new, darker, colour before you turn back to the sink. But that evening you notice them again, dark and empty as the night sky.

Oh, well. These things happen when you’re growing up. The world seems sharper these days, like you’re seeing it in the mirror. Autumn is coming on, minute by minute, leaf by leaf.

It’s a sunny day in March and you’re trying to take a selfie for the groupchat. You pose, grin, and click, and click, and click again, but every photo you take is somehow unsendable. Every time something is somehow, undefinably, undeniably wrong, until you’re staring at your own face in the screen of your phone, thinking Is that really me? and wondering when your features got that sharp.

Still, you’ve seen your old ID photos, seen how the childish roundness of your face fades away. You’re closer to adulthood than you’ve ever been before.

Another leaf falls, another grain of sand slips through the hourglass.

Time stagnates around you. You begin to feel your voice resonate behind your collarbones and through your skull when you speak. April disappears in a gust of wind and a shower of rain. Alone, the chorus of your voice echoes off your bathroom walls and the concrete of the parking lot.

In May, you look in the mirror and the points of your teeth catch the grey light, glimmering like icy leaves.

Winter opens with a cold snap, and you are being set alight. All you can feel is something incoherent, unidentifiable, inconsolable, an ache in your chest that feels like drinking molten metal. The emptiness resonates through the earth and the bare heavens, it tears you open and empties you out, and then it swallows you whole.

It’s the shortest day of the year when you realise you aren’t the same person you were six months ago. You think this girl wouldn’t recognise the old you if she was staring her in the face.

But on the first day of spring you look in the mirror and the face that looks back is yours again.