THROUGH MY EYES

Chapter 1 — Mirror City Life? Isn’t it beautiful, we wake up everyday and most times we forget how wonderful, the view in front of us truly is. Rena had said that to a mirror once, and the mirror had kept the secret like a good witness. The city answered in its own way: neon bleeding into gutters, trams sighing past closed faces, the bakery downstairs that never closed and whose ovens kept the building warm like a secret. She lived above that bakery in a narrow apartment that smelled of sugar and old film reels. The smell steadied her. It was a domestic anchor in a life that would ask her to be spectacle. She learned the city by its reflections. A shop window could sharpen her jawline; a puddle could turn a streetlamp into a small obedient sun. Faces were currency; faces were maps. She read them the way other people read weather. The mirror in her room, however, was not vanity. It was a ledger. It kept accounts of small betrayals and larger promises, the way a ledger keeps numbers until someone decides to balance them. On the morning she arrived, she performed a ritual she had learned from her mother: press palms to the glass and let the town’s faces pass through you like a slow parade. Her hands were small and steady. She traced the pale crescent scar at the base of her thumb with a fingertip. The scar had a story she told herself in the dark: a roof, a fall, a decision. Memory leaked in the town like rain; sometimes it pooled in alleys and sometimes it ran clean down the gutters. Rena had learned to step around the puddles. She had learned to drink from them when she needed to. There was a knock at the door that sounded like a question. Tommina stood in the doorway with a cigarette stub and a grin that had been polished by too many late nights. He carried an envelope that smelled faintly of other people’s perfume and decisions. “You’re up early,” he said. The sentence was both observation and accusation. “Someone has to be,” she replied. She took the envelope and felt the weight of it. Inside was a single sheet of paper and a name she’d been practicing in the mirror: Rena Valente. The letterhead was glossy, the language careful. An invitation, a first set, a chance to be seen by people who could make a life of you. Tommina watched her face for the flicker of doubt. He had been with her since the small rooms, the unpaid bills, the nights when the only audience was a radiator and a cat. He knew the way she could turn a yes into a fortress and a no into a rumor. “You want it,” he said. She looked at the paper, at the neat type that promised cameras and lights and a crew that would call her by a name that wasn’t hers. She thought of the bakery downstairs, of the woman who braided hair, of the scar on her thumb. She thought of the way the town’s faces blurred when she let them. “I want to be seen,” she said. Tommina’s grin softened into something like relief. He folded the cigarette between his fingers and offered it to her like a benediction. Outside, the city moved on, indifferent and hungry. Inside, Rena folded the invitation into her palm and felt the first small tremor of a life rearranging itself. She would learn, later, how much of herself she could afford to give away. For now, the light was honest and the town was patient. She stepped to the window, palms to the glass, and let the faces pass. The world was a stage and she had a ticket. She would buy the front row. That evening, after the bakery’s ovens cooled and the city’s neon began to hum, she sat with the envelope on her knees and practiced the tilt of her head in the mirror. The tilt had to be precise: enough softness to invite, enough steel to keep the ledger balanced. She traced the scar at the base of her thumb and wrote a single line in a small notebook: I will be seen. The sentence felt like a promise and a contract. Outside, rain began to fall, and the town’s faces blurred into a single, patient parade.