• The overhead lighting in his bathroom seemed dimmer than usual.
    He forces eye contact and tries making sense of an
    unrecognizable reflection.

    A deep breath takes him to age five.
    I didn’t do it,
    he insists while hiding his chocolate-covered fingers
    behind his back. Eyes on his mother holding
    an empty cookie jar, mind on the taste still on his tongue
    and his satisfied tummy.

    Sudden as a paper cut, he ages thirteen years.
    A blink jolts him back to the moment of
    quickly zippered jeans and car-bound sobs,
    as he confesses to his windshield a Saturday night ritual
    that shames him at church on Sunday.

    A present glance at the mirror shows those same streaked cheaks
    he had as he sat outside her apartment,
    interrupted
    by the vibration of a phone call from his girlfriend.
    Where are you?
    Tell her you didn’t do it.
    He bites his lip as he realizes not all guilty pleasures
    are satisfying.
    And his silence tells more than any words possibly could.