The man in the window

I find myself here again, late at night, staring at the man in the dark window of my home office. The computer screen's glow casts just enough light to see him looking back at me, his features both familiar and strange. We've been meeting like this more often lately, these quiet confrontations with the person I've become.

"Who are you?" I ask the reflection, though I already know the answer will be silence. The man in the glass watches me with eyes that have seen too much, carrying shadows deeper than the night behind him. Once, those eyes belonged to someone else – a kid, an analyst, a tech guy, someone who thought the war happened in movies, in books, in briefings, and on screens.

That man died in the mountains of Afghanistan. Or maybe he didn't die so much as shatter, like a mirror struck by a bullet, pieces of him scattering across the Hindu Kush. The man who came back was assembled from those fragments, each shard reflecting a different kind of pain and strength.

"I don't recognize us sometimes," I tell him. "The constant vigilance, the anger that comes from nowhere, the way we can't seem to relax even in safe spaces. We're supposed to be past this. It's been years since we left those mountains."

The reflection's expression softens slightly, and understanding is written in the lines around his eyes. We both know some transformations can't be undone. Some changes write themselves into your bones, becoming part of the face that stares back from every reflective surface.

"Remember that little boy, though?" I ask, and for a moment, I see a flicker of something lighter in those mirrored eyes. "The one who waved at us from his doorway? Even in that place of death and fear, he reminded us that beauty still existed. That innocence could survive. His smile was like sunlight on broken glass – scattered but still bright, capable of illuminating the darkness."

I press my hand against the cold window, watching my reflection do the same. The glass between our palms might as well be years, might as well be mountains, might as well be the distance between who I was and who I am. We went into those mountains as one person and came out as another, fractured and reformed like light through a prism.

"But maybe," I say softly, "that's not entirely bad. Maybe being broken and remade has given us angles we didn't have before, ways of seeing that we couldn't have understood otherwise. We survived. We made it home. And yes, we're different – but we're still here, fighting to make sense of the image in the glass."

The man in the window looks tired, but there's something else there, too. Something that wasn't there in those first dark days after coming home. Maybe it's resilience or acceptance. It's like a mirror that's been broken and pieced back together, showing not just one reality but many, each fragment holding its own truth.

"We need to stop fighting what we see," I tell him. "Stop wishing for the unbroken reflection of before. We did what we had to do. We're healing the best we can. And maybe that's enough – maybe the cracks and seams in us now are part of the story we're meant to tell."

A car passes outside, headlights sweeping through the room, and the man in the glass disappears into the glare for a moment. When he returns, I notice something I hadn't seen before – a slight upturn at the corners of his mouth, a small suggestion that peace is possible, even for people like us who carry battlefields in our reflections.

"We're not who we were," I acknowledge. "But each piece of us, each fragment and fissure, has its own kind of beauty. Its own kind of strength."

The man in the glass nods almost imperceptibly. I know we'll have more meetings like this. More nights of trying to reconcile the many versions of ourselves we see in mirrors and windows and quiet moments of reflection. But for tonight, this is enough – this silent understanding between the man I was and the man I am, this gentle acceptance of our brokenness and beauty.

I reach out and touch the glass one final time. "We've got this," I whisper. "One reflection at a time."

The man in the window doesn't answer, but his eyes hold mine with something like hope. Some conversations don't need words – they live in the space between what was and what could be, in the infinite reflections of a soul learning to love its own broken light.