I look deep into your eyes, reflecting a sadness carried often by many, understood by few. The oceanic blue twinkles in the light, reminding me of starlight, moonlight, shifting repetitions of light and dark in immeasurable amounts. I know those eyes, so well, the skeptical glance, the way you try to hide the deep secrets flowing and ebbing out from the windows to your soul. You try to catch it back before it reaches me, but I am too quick for you, too smart to not notice. You know, I see the soul you believe doesn’t exist. Those eyes have looked at me for my entire life, they can see my entire being sketched upon that non-existent soul. I am distracted by the bags you carry underneath the piercing blue, you have learned to hold your head at a certain angle so they appear as ghosts of themselves. But I can always imagine you, laying tossing in bed, visions of ex-friends and former boyfriends dancing through your head. You seem to be tortured in some way. They come to you in the night, your mistakes, and take from you the sleep you need to let them go and forget. That emotional baggage is etched into your face. Your round, moonlike face, the one you inherited from your matriarch. A spectacular mirror image of her, 30 years later, but every groove, every softness just the same, like a clone, a carbon copy. Except you scowl more often than smile. Whereas she smiles more often than scowls. Deep inside, your fear lurks, spilling out in a crashing panic of dark emotion, on the surface your deep brown/black eyebrows knit together and the eyes I see every time I look up are lost in clouds of flashing, envious green. You are framed ironically by yellow, golden hair, falling so elegantly around my most well known face. Layers of blonde around a dark, stormy pair of eyebrows which scream detrimentally. The panic is only hinted at by this subtle change in eye colour, you control all else, you sport what you can only describe as ‘resting bitch face’, but you know you just want people to believe in the tough exterior you put on display, they can never see the frightened, lost little girl you hide beneath that mask of silence, only blasé emoting from it. You sport facial piercing scars, fading to quiet nothingness, a small mark of the parts of the anger you have let go, removing them slowly, allowing a short, glimmering glimpse into what I can see is your true self. Finally less afraid to let go, maybe let others in, to see the beauty you hid behind those piercings. Letting the persona fall away as you gained confidence in your own appearance. The flow of your soft, rounded cheeks would never show tear tracks making their shiny way across your face to anyone but me, I am the only one who judges your acne scars, your blemishes, your crows feet. As you push further into your thirties I will be the one who first notices all the changes in the landscape that is your beautiful face. I see because you allow me to, there’s nothing you can do to change the fact that I am not blinded by your masks, your face will always give you away to me, you can’t hide from the girl reflecting into the mirror.