What the Silver Knew – By Nadili Soman

The bottle of dye sat on the bathroom shelf for a year before I threw it away. My partner had been dead for seven months.

Grief, in those days, had a texture like the weather. It settled over the house and stayed. It was his coffee cup, sitting clean but unused in the drying rack. His shoes by the door, angled the way he’d stepped out of them. The silence sitting in his chair like a guest who wouldn’t leave. I moved through the rooms of my own life like a woman visiting a house she used to own. I would find myself standing in the hallway, looking at things we had bought together, unable to remember the woman who had chosen them. One ordinary day, I looked up. There she was in the mirror. Me. Except I didn’t recognize her. She was older than the woman I carried in my head. Thinner in the face. Tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch. The shock was small but unmistakable, the way you flinch at a photograph that catches you mid-sentence, unguarded. “So this is what a hollowed woman looks like”, I thought. For months, I had stayed clear of mirrors. I had no interest in dressing up.