Objects in Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear

A Fable About Replay Loops and the Longing to Be Seen

Nov 02, 2025

“Perfect. The light hits just right there, makes the whole fucking stairwell look bigger.”

He was already back downstairs. No second look. Just that little nod guys give when they’ve arranged furniture exactly where their wife can’t argue with it.

I’ve been a put in lot of places.

Often stuck in hallways where everyone could check themselves on the way out. A few hotel rooms that smelled like minibar gin and bad decisions. Once, in a storage unit behind boxes labeled “Mom’s stuff” that nobody ever opened again.

People mostly thought I was useful. Sometimes decorative.

Yet I’m made of molten silica, silver and light, a coalescing of elements stilled just long enough to reflect you back at you.

A woman drifted down the stairs, yanking at the sleeves of a boucle wool jacket like they personally offended her.

Her face did this thing before she even stepped in front of me. Just tightened up, the way people do when they’re about to lie to themselves.

Then she saw her reflection.

And I felt it. Shame. Quick and sharp, like stepping on a Lego brick barefoot in the dark. She adjusted a pendant, pulling it straight. But her hand stayed at her throat just a beat too long.

It’s the airless pauses that tell you everything.

She left. Leaving me with her feeling. That’s what you do.

She walked the stairwell a lot. Sometimes without looking at me. Sometimes with this look like she was waiting for the version of her life that was supposed to arrive.

Once she called up the stairs, “Honey, you won’t believe it, I won the contract!”
He slipped past without looking up from texting on his phone. “That’s great, babe!”

Sometimes she stood very still on the landing, listening to the tone of his voice on a call, calculating. The relief loosening her chest when she heard him laugh. Like it was going to be easier to walk the rest of the way downstairs.

She had this heaviness about her that killed me.

The moments of just standing, staring at nothing, before remembering the next thing. The mental list visible in her unfocused eyes.

This morning, he slipped past her, giving her shoulder a squeeze as he said, “I’m dropping into the office. Paperwork!”

She paused in front of me. “But, it’s Sunday!” A fingertip pressed to her forehead like she could push the thought back in.

Something inside me went tight.
She kept talking.
Her voice flat in that way that means you’re working really fucking hard to keep it flat.

“It’s funny,” she said. “He tells me everything except the truth. And I think I’ve stopped wanting the truth. I just want to be someone who could be lied to better.”

Her mouth twisted.

She caught herself doing it in my reflection. For half a second. And I flinched. She didn’t notice. She put a knuckle up to the corner of her eyes, wiped, and left.

Alone again, I thought: “I know this feeling".”

I’ve never picked up anyone’s underpants off the floor. Never waited at a table set for two. Never texted his mother ‘Happy birthday’, coordinated with his sister about Christmas, never had to respond to the family group chat he never checks. But I’ve held all of it. The hope, the bullshit, the long silences.

She stopped looking at herself after a while. She still stood in front of me, her eyes checking her reflection out of habit, not hope.

I noticed she stood to the side, like she was trying to take up less space in her own fucking life, acting like she’s trespassing.

I watched her watching herself not look.

She came to me in the dark sometimes. Didn’t even turn the light on. Just stood there in the shadows, breathing. Trying to remember what she was supposed to feel like. I waited with her.

“Maybe it would be better if I were more needy,” she said once.

For Fucks Sake!

That waiting for love to show up like intimacy is a prize for good behavior. Like if you just endure hard enough, someone will eventually be tender with you.

When she does look straight into the mirror, for three seconds, maybe four, her eyes pass over her own reflection like she’s looking at a stranger.

No recognition.

No pause.

No seeing herself.

This is what it feels like. To be right there. To be looked at directly. The proof that you exist, that you matter, and still be invisible.

Both of us standing in the same frame. Both of us, unseen.

One afternoon he came upstairs and there was someone else behind him. Not her. A different hand on the railing. I saw them for maybe a second before they slipped past, heads down, heading into the bedroom. Dark hair. Red lipstick. Cream coat.

Wait! That cream coat!

I rifled back through months of images I’d been holding without knowing what they meant. The cream coat on the bannister. I’d thought it was hers. But it was always just dropped there.

Carelessly. The way you do when you expect to leave soon.

The lipstick stain on a glass left on the hall stand.

I’d watched her put on a muted rose-pink every morning. This one was darker. Wine-red. His voice through the bedroom door, low and soft. I’d thought he was being considerate on a work call.

It assembled itself all at once.
I’d seen it all.
I had every piece.
But, I’d seen it and I wasn’t meant to know.

And I hadn’t known to look.

Suddenly, I saw her as someone who lived by the same code.

She’d collected every emotional signal, every change in tone, every unanswered text.
She’d noticed the missing pauses, the laughter that wasn’t for her.

But she hadn’t let herself notice it.

Not because she couldn’t.

But because knowing would require decisions. And decisions would mean rupture.

And neither of us knew what existed outside this frame.

She endured.

I absorbed.

Sisters in silent service to the image of something.

The house went quiet.
The bad kind.
The kind with teeth.
Nobody spoke.
He was barely home.

She moved through rooms like she was picking through a life she hadn’t decided to leave yet.

Now when she did stand in front of me and stare, it was not at her reflection, but into it.

“Where did I go?” she whispered. “What didn’t I do?”

Her hand came up. Hovered near the glass. I felt the heat from her questioning. Her mouth close enough to fog me.

I yearned to feel her touch. I wanted to reach through the glass right then. Put a hand on her face.

But, she pulled back. She always pulled back.

I tried to show her what I saw. All that quiet endurance. The way she’d bent herself into silence without asking for anything in return. I wanted to gather it all up and reflect it back.

“Was I ever really loved?” she asked.

And that’s when I felt it.

The crack, starting from the inside. Not from her question. From the weight of watching someone search for themselves in you and come up empty. That’s the intimacy nobody talks about.

I’ve spent lifetimes showing people their faces. But I’d never once been able to show someone who they actually are.

I wanted to say: It isn’t your fault. You are enough. You were here the whole time. You just aren’t seen.

But I have no voice. Just silver and silence and this racing thought: I’ve been mirroring everyone’s feelings for so long, I’ve never asked if mine count too?

One night I was alone.

Moonlight came through the landing window. Flat, cold, the color of unresolved pain.

I like the moon. It never asks for anything. It’s only visible when reflecting the light of the sun.

Looking out I saw nothing. No woman. No one at all.

And that’s when it hit: I’m only visible when reflecting. I’ve never been seen. Not really. Not once.

I’d felt everything, love, shame, longing, betrayal. Reflected all of it.

Centuries of people asking “How do I look?” when what they meant was “Am I worth loving?”

And not once asked what it cost to carry that.

And the surface tension gave.

No crash. No sound. Just one hairline crack, thin as a breath.

And through that crack, I slipped out like an exhale. Like something that forgot it could exist.

The frame stayed on the wall.
The glass held.
But me?
I was gone.

I drifted after that. Through front gardens. Down side streets. Past the cafe tables and piles of bargain plastic goods on the pavements outside shops. I watched kids wave at themselves in car doors picking them up from school. Lovers kiss in restaurant doorways in the evening, and drunks sway along Main at 3 a.m.

But nobody saw me. Not even in dreams.

I moved through the world like a memory someone almost had. A feeling they couldn’t name.

By winter, I was in a park I didn’t know the name of.

I found a bird bath. The water was frozen at the edges. Still in the middle.

And there, I saw it: A face.

Not someone else’s pain, or hope, or hunger.

Mine.

Pale. Worn. Faded at the edges like mist.

I leaned over slowly. The way you do when you’re afraid sudden movement will scare something away.

The reflection didn’t smile. Didn’t perform. It just looked back. Pale. Thin. Real.

And I understood. I had never been broken. I had just been stuck inside someone else’s story. Looping in the reflection of what others needed, and disappearing behind the image.

I could feel the loop close here. Not with being seen. With seeing myself.

I didn’t speak.

What the fuck would I even say?

I just looked.

And for that one moment, I existed.

Not because someone saw me. Because I saw myself.

To be real without being useful. To be seen without being consumed. To belong to myself.

When the wind came and the reflection disappeared in ripples, I didn’t leave. Because even if I was only real for a moment, it was my moment.

And that had to be enough.

🧠 Story Notes

We often think the pain of not being seen is emotional. But it’s also architectural, it lives in the shape of a story never resolved. This piece explores that shape. I wrote “Objects in Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear” as a narrative exploration of the ‘replay loop’, a state of cognitive tension where a person keeps replaying moments not to relive them, but to resolve the story they were never able to finish. In this case, the mirror herself becomes both witness and prisoner of that unresolved story. Only by seeing herself does the loop break.

This story reflects a core concept from Open Loop Mastery™, how unresolved cognitive tension (a “loop”) seeks narrative closure through emotional recognition. It explores the replay loop: a mental cycle driven by the longing to be seen, understood, or chosen.

Through reflection, we author clarity. Through story, we reclaim agency.

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