The mirror

This is so beautiful... keep creating amazing stuff like this... I am so amazed I am using ...s. I love the way you are using details like, "dark brown eyes", "red at the rims" "cheeks grew damp", "lips gave away" and "heavy drops" really worked so well and stood out to me as such good describing words for crying.

I need team tortoise to beat tikaa so
ohayo gozaimassssssuuu we meet again.


this was a VERY nice poem. I quite enjoyed how the entire thing was seeing the face from a point of view other than yours. It was a great insight into the mind of the narrator.

Late that night,
I saw the face in my mirror cry.

It's feels like I'm reading it at midnight while it's raining no matter what's the time. It can settle a person to it's own orbit.

Okay, the ending of this one got me 🥹 "But I realized, those were not its tears" is such a quiet, perfect twist. You build the whole poem around the reflection crying, and then in one short line the reader realizes the speaker has been crying the entire time and didn't notice until their thumb came away wet. That moment of recognition is the heart of the piece, and the plain, understated way you deliver it is exactly why it works. 👏 I also love the opening idea: "It was a face I have known forever, yet it felt like a stranger I never met." That's such an honest way to describe what it feels like to look at yourself in a hard moment, when your own face suddenly seems like someone else's, and it makes the twist at the end feel earned.
The details in the middle are lovely too. "Its dark brown eyes became a sudden ocean" is a vivid image, and I like how the poem moves from the eyes to the damp cheeks to the trembling lips, like a camera slowly moving down the face. 🌊 The "warm palm on its cheek" is my favorite physical detail, because it's the first time the speaker does something gentle for themselves, even if they think they're comforting a stranger. Reaching out to comfort the reflection is also a beautiful way to show self-compassion without ever naming it. And keeping "it" and "its" instead of "my" is a really smart choice, because that distance is the whole emotional engine of the poem. The speaker can only be tender to themselves once they've turned themselves into someone else. 💛
Now the nitpicks, because I can't turn it off 😅 "I saw my mirror crying" is slightly off for me. Mirrors don't cry, reflections do, and the poem later makes clear it's the face in it, so "my reflection" or "the face in my mirror" would be more precise and would save the twist from feeling like a technicality. 🤔 Some of the images also feel a bit familiar. "Sudden ocean" for crying eyes and "lips trembling like leaves in a breeze" are comparisons many readers have met before, and they sit next to a much more original idea (the stranger who has your face). Swapping one of them for something only you would notice, like how the eyes look red at the edges or how the face crumples before the tears actually fall, would bring the middle up to the level of the opening and the ending. The leaves line is also the longest in the poem and the one that slows it down most, so a trim would help.
A couple of smaller things: "That day," is vague, and since the poem is so intimate, giving us even one hint (what kind of day, what time, what just happened) would make the crying feel more real, though you could also leave it blank on purpose if you want it universal. "I looked at it." is a very flat line sitting between two richer ones, and I'd either cut it or turn it into something with a bit more feeling, like what the speaker noticed first. The sentence starting "How its dark brown eyes became..." reads like a fragment, and I think it works as a gentle list, but it could be punctuated more clearly so it doesn't feel like a mistake. Finally, the ellipsis after "with my thumb..." is a nice pause, but it's followed by "But I realized" on its own line, so you get two beats of buildup, and I'd keep just one so the reveal lands harder. The last line itself is almost too neat, since it tells us what the poem has been showing, so if you ever want a bolder ending, you could stop at the thumb and let the reader do the realizing themselves. ✨
Overall it's delicate, honest, and the twist is the kind that makes me want to read it again from the top. Tighten the middle imagery, fix "mirror" versus "reflection," and give "that day" a little more life, and this goes from lovely to unforgettable. 🪞

Sometimes the face in the mirror is the only one who cries for you, so keep writing what it's been trying to say." 🪞