If I keep going, I won’t recognise myself in my own eulogy.

I had become a product of their comfort. Not my own truth.

You don’t notice her at first.

You’re brushing your teeth. It’s late. The light above the mirror flickers like it’s trying to tell you something. Your eyes are puffy. You’ve been crying, but not enough to count, not enough to break open your ribs until the truth spills out. Just the type of crying that fogs your head like shower steam.

You wipe the mirror and your eyes. Because what you see isn’t you. Not your face. Not quite.

The woman in the mirror tilts her head a second before you do. Her mouth opens, but the words come from your throat, in your voice. A whisper that tastes like blood and ashes:

"That’s not who I was. That’s not who I was. That’s not who I was."

You blink. Rub your face. Turn the tap hotter.

But Victoria doesn’t leave.

---

In Eirenfall City, they say you get to write your own ending. Or at least, that’s the story they sell you. At sixteen, the Tribunal of Fates presents you with your Life Statement — a script you’re supposed to claim as your own. They dare you to edit it, to revise it like a precious gift. Everyone submits theirs at eighteen, still pristine, untouched by rebellion. You’re allowed updates at thirty, revisions at fifty. But in the end, you die marked by the brand they gave you — and the Eulogy Network broadcasts your final act at seven, just before the communal meal. The choice was yours, but only because surrendering to someone else’s story felt like freedom.

Victoria revised hers every year. She was so good. So careful. So beloved.

Her Life Statement read: “She believed in harmony. She made people feel calm. She loved without condition. She worked quietly, behind the scenes.”

Snapshots that aligned with her fate faded into each other, the moments an open wound to the ghost that haunted them. The broadcast was hollow, devoid of the hidden moments when she let herself live.

When she screamed underwater in the public bathhouse pool, the only place she could hide the sound. She stayed beneath until her lungs burned, until her voice was hoarse for days, and no one asked why she whispered. The year she spent memorising his preferences: which tone of voice made him feel powerful, which dresses made him call her beautiful, which friends she had to slowly ghost so he wouldn’t sulk on Sundays. At first, she called it a compromise. Later, quietly, to herself, she named it for what it was, a performance. That after she walked the streets, smiling at strangers she would turn the lights out and bite the soft part of her arm just to feel something of her own. Half-moons lined her skin in private. She told herself it was nothing. That everyone copes somehow.

They certainly didn’t show her — Anna.

Anna was red where Victoria was beige. Anna burst into rooms like someone had dared her to be brilliant. She had calloused fingers and a laugh that sounded like it had never been tamed, that invited you to be wild too. They met at a reclamation site outside Zone 7, repurposing old books that had survived the Cleansing.

Anna pressed a page into Victoria’s palm once and whispered, “You only get one body. You deserve to live in it.”

They drank coffee laced with cinnamon slowly, with eye contact, like one of them might dare to voice what lived in the tension between them. They walked home too close and not close enough. They never kissed. But one night, Anna touched Victoria’s wrist so softly it made her knees shake. And Victoria said nothing.

She said nothing because silence was safer. Because what was known had always been synonymous with survival.

She didn’t say, I want you. She only said, I should go. She thought she’d have time.

They played her eulogy on a Tuesday. The broadcast painted her as serene. Loyal. An example. People wept politely. The flowers at her memorial were all white.

But the first woman to see her wasn’t at the ceremony. She was brushing her teeth in a housing block five zones away. And when Victoria’s mouth opened through the mirror, the world tilted.

Because she was supposed to be gone. She wasn’t supposed to be here, watching. Whispering.

And she wasn’t alone.

Since the broadcasts began, the mirrors have been breaking protocol. Women report strange reflections. Lipstick messages on bathroom tiles. Scrap-paper tucked under pillows with scrawled notes:

The cracks in the mask are where truth leaks out. Don’t wait for permission to exist. They’ll write your story for you — steal it back first.

They say the ghosts are multiplying. That they’re loud. And queer. And unrepentant.

That one of them wears all black, a silhouette folding into the darkness — shadows falling out of her like she’s bleeding out. That her name is Victoria. And she is not done yet.

---

It was a Tuesday, I think. Maybe a Thursday. My son was asleep in the next room, and I was on the couch with a chipped mug of tea—black, milk, enough honey to rot my teeth, cooling fast. My partner was talking. They always did if I asked the right questions, like a thousand paper cuts, making sure the secret to their love bled out on the floor between us.

I was listening. Not to connect. Not to witness. But to collect.

I was making a mental spreadsheet: things they said they hated about their exes. Things they claimed to love in others. Words they flinched at. Strangers they mocked in passing. Colours they found “too much.” The perfume that made them gag once in a shopping centre. The books they said were “a bit preachy.” I took notes like it was gospel.

I wasn’t listening to them.
I was listening for the rules.

Somewhere along the line, I’d been taught that love was performance art. And I was a damn good understudy. I could become whoever you needed me to be before you even realised you needed it.

And then, mid-sentence—while they were saying something benign about oat milk being pretentious—it hit me like a punch to the sternum:

If I keep going, I won’t recognise myself in my own eulogy. My son will have no idea who I truly am. And I will die, with the ashes of my true self already cremated.

And that thought—god, it split something in me.

I realised I’d been doing it everywhere. Not just in love. In friendships, in instagram, in motherhood, in activism, in the way I smiled at strangers and softened my sentences. I’d mistaken approval for love, attention for devotion, believing that by emptying myself, by offering up every piece they demanded, shaping myself to fit their desires—I was giving them what they wanted. Never realising that those who ached for me searched for me beneath the wreckage, but only for the reflection of their own expectations, a hollow shape to fill the space they needed. And those who didn’t want me never had the opportunity to decide that for themselves.I’d been shaping myself so carefully, smoothing every edge to fit into their expectations, that I forgot what it felt like to truly consume myself — to drink in my own wildness, my own colors, like the sunset’s slow burn across the sky. Letting go of being palatable wasn’t just surrender — it was remembering how to be fully alive inside my own skin, how to taste every raw, messy, beautiful part of me again, not giving a shit if someone else chokes on it.

I had become a product of their comfort. Not my own truth.

So now, I write. Not because I think I’ve got it all figured out but because the smoke still rises from the part of me I almost buried alive.

I write because I want to be unmistakably me—on the page, in the room, in the mirror.

And if you’re reading this and feeling a lump in your throat or a tightness in your ribs, you are not alone.

We can un-cremate the self.
We can find ourselves within the ashes.