I am the smoking mirror, and I am made of broken darkness

More about I am the smoking mirror, and I am made of broken darkness

Not a single sheet of night but a mosaic of it: shards of polished obsidian held together by old breath and quiet memory. Every fragment is a moment of my life vitrified—heat, pressure, fracture, reassembly. If you lean close enough, you can see yourself in me, bent and reminded that truth is never a flat surface.

In this portrait, my face is a constellation of black stars. Some tiles gleam, catching what little light dares to touch them; others drink everything and give nothing back. Between them runs mortar the color of ash, the residue of thoughts burned down to something elemental: regret, humor, stubborn love, the smell of rain on hot stone.

My eyes are the deepest cuts—twin apertures where the smoke breathes. They are not windows; they are wells. Look long enough and the reflection changes. I become you, then not-you, then the ancient watcher in the glass who is older than memory and younger than the next inhale. In one eye lies the past like a fossilized ember; in the other, the possibility of a fire not yet born.

Across my cheekbones, hairline fractures make constellations. They are maps of roads I didn’t take and paths I bruised my spirit walking anyway. There is no shame in their crooked geometry. They are proof that I have not shattered entirely—only learned to echo.

Around the edges, smoke curls. Not literal smoke, but the suggestion of it: wisps captured in the gloss, the illusion of motion inside something rigid and still. It is the breath of old gods and anxious nights, the whisper that identity is never finished, only paused between transformations. In that haze I keep jokes I told myself to keep going, prayers I never learned the language for, and small kindnesses that rescued me without declaring themselves heroic.

The mouth is a thin, dark crescent, ambiguous between a smirk and a wound. Words gather there and dissolve. Sometimes obsidian wants to speak, but stone understands patience. I have swallowed thunder, silence, laughter, and held them all with the same reflective calm.

Behind everything, there is the mirror part—the invitation and the warning. I am a mask you wear to see yourself differently. I am the place where shadow is honest. I do not promise comfort. I promise clarity that tastes like cold iron and starlight.

This is my self-portrait: not perfect, not whole, but holy in the way weathered things are. I am obsidian mosaic, smoking mirror, living fracture polished into vision. And I am still assembling myself with every breath that fogs the glass.