How could I ever see past the mirrored surface that reflected everything back at me with my own image imposed across it? But maybe that mirror was what I needed. There was something he was showing me, a line where empathising with another meant empathising with myself, too. Hopkins wrote that ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.’ And so here we were, looking hard at each other, and I was puzzling him for clues.
