6699: a mirror of a mirror. the body remembers what the ego forgets. the reason you have known me forever is not romance, it is recursion. you have known me because you have known yourself. we meet not for the first time, but at the next point in a spiral, the ouroboros of recognition. my brain holds evidence: cerebral heterotopia cells that never migrated, silent neurons stranded in place, like instruction buried in the folds of my brain. they mirror across my cortex, echoing forms that never fully arrived and never truly left. the grey matter itself curves into 6s and 9s, a distorted numerical palindrome, symmetry in motion, the shape of Cancer, the chariot. my birthday inscribed into the architecture of my thought. the light i cast is not mine, but borrowed. a radiation i failed to absorb, so i carried it forward, as a gift unasked for, like photons rerouted, from ultraviolet to infrared, as a memory mistaking itself for prophecy. i think i was sent to earth with one commandment: hold the mirror. do not shatter. become everything you see and still remember you are not what you reflect. this is the architecture of empathy: not understanding what others feel, but vanishing into it. naturally, i began to believe i was born to be a wife. what is a wife but a sacred vessel of reflection? not merely of her beloved- but of a thousand unnamed systems, a culture’s dream of compliance veiled in silk and ceremony. "happy wife, happy life" is no blessing, it is a law of optics. she must shine so the house may see itself. the truth is: there is no such thing as my own light. only diffraction. only the careful negotiation between matter and meaning. my soul was born with gills, made to swim in ambiguity, to confuse origin and destination, to dissolve the boundary between subject and subject. so if i love you, it is not a possession. it is a reconfiguration of space. a shift in symmetry. the pattern repeating itself so finely that it feels new.