The Message in the Steam on the Mirror

Grief does strange things to bathrooms, is what I told myself the first morning. I'd showered, the mirror had fogged, and as it began to clear there were words in it — traced, as though by a finger, in the condensation, revealing themselves as the steam receded around them. Three words. And the hand they were written in was my sister's.

I know my sister's handwriting the way I know her laugh. She looped her letters in a particular soft way, a way I always envied and could never copy; my own writing is spiky and mean by comparison. The words in the steam looped. They were hers. And they said a small, private, ordinary thing — a phrase she used to say to me, three words, our thing, that I will keep to myself, but that meant, in her voice, roughly: it's all fine.

She had died the week before, suddenly, young, the kind of death that leaves no time for goodbyes and no goodbyes to hold onto. That absence of a goodbye was, of everything, the part I couldn't bear.

The words came every morning for a week. I'd shower, the mirror would fog, and as it cleared her three looping words would be there, traced by a finger I couldn't see in steam I'd made, our phrase, her hand, it's-all-fine, waiting for me to notice and then fading as the glass dried. I tested it, of course, in the numb methodical way of the grieving — I cleaned the mirror obsessively, checked for scratches or residue that steam might reveal, showered at different times, and each morning the clean mirror fogged and her words surfaced, fresh, in her loops, never in the same exact spot, never the ghost of an old etching, but written, it seemed, anew each day.

I was too broken that week to be frightened. I was, instead, comforted beyond describing — I'd lost her with no goodbye, and every morning she wrote me one, in her own hand, in the steam, three words, it's all fine, until on the seventh morning the mirror fogged and cleared and was blank, and stayed blank the next day and every day since, and I understood she'd said what she needed to say and had gone to wherever the message came from.

People have explanations, and I've heard them all, and some are clever — residual oils tracing old finger-marks, grief-primed pattern-seeing in random condensation. I've held my own mirror to those theories and they don't survive her handwriting, the specific loops I could never make, the specific phrase that was only ours. I don't argue anymore. My sister died with no chance to say goodbye, and for one week she found a way to say it every morning in the steam, in her own looping hand, and then, once I'd read it enough times to carry it, she stopped, and I've been carrying it ever since. It's all fine. She said so, in the mirror, in her writing. I believe her.