She thinks I’m just walls but I know things.

I see the books beside her bed, light with dust, waiting for the woman she keeps promising herself she will become.

I see the chair in the corner of her bedroom, covered in receipts and clothes she tried on when she didn’t know who she wanted to be. Sweaters draped as if in a backbend.

The side table in the living room with old mail, to do lists, and a light blue planner she never opened. She says she hasn’t had time to organize it all but I know it’s where her decisions go when she doesn’t want to make them.

Then there’s the hallway closet filled with thinned sheets from another time. The same closet that smells of lavender and her mom’s antique linen pillowcases.

The vase, from someone she no longer speaks to, is stashed behind glassware, she never uses, in the kitchen cabinet with loose hinges.

I know the room she avoids. The one that is silent but was once filled with a child’s laughter. The one, her now adult child, hasn’t stayed in for 5 years. The one whose walls are still filled with concert posters and the smell of stale incense.

She says it hasn’t been touched because she doesn’t know what to keep or donate. But I know it’s unfinished because something in her life is.

The dress in her closet that no longer fits but still carries the perfume of a night when she felt chosen.

The bowl she never uses, but cannot give away.

The French antique console with a drawer full of keys to doors she no longer opens.

She thinks I’m just walls.

But between them she reveals herself.

I am not a judge.

I am a mirror.

I am her home.

And I will always know when she is living inside a life she has already outgrown.