Mirroring Me of You, You of Me

I. The Hands
His hands remember before he does,
the curl of fingers around a hammer,
the quiet patience of tightening, fixing, holding.
The boy borrows them without asking,
lifts them into his own small reach,
tries on their calluses like a future.
Years pass, and one day
the father watches his own gestures
moving through another body.

II. The Voice
It begins as mimicry,
a shadow repeating sound.
A tone caught in the throat,
a laugh shaped by listening.
Then slowly it deepens, diverges,
yet still carries that familiar grain,
like wood cut from the same tree.
The father hears himself
in answers he never rehearsed.

III. The Distance
They walk apart to learn the shape of themselves,
opposite ends of a long conversation.
The son steps beyond the edge of the father’s knowing,
tests horizons the father only imagined.
Still, in the quiet afterwards,
each returns to the other’s outline,
finding it unchanged in memory,
a map neither can quite discard.

IV. The Return

Time folds strangely,
the father aging into questions,
the son into understanding.
They meet again not as before,
but as echoes that finally recognize themselves.
In the son’s care, the father sees
the circle close without ending:
one life leaning into the next,
each becoming what the other once was.