I Am No Longer an Image

The last rays of the sun vanished behind Kyoto’s horizon, giving way to a cold, clear night. In the studio, shadows slowly stretched across the walls, like spectral fingers reaching for something invisible. The cracked mirror — now a silent witness to their tumultuous story — reflected the room's contours with unsettling fidelity despite its fractures.

Isao watched Lucille from a distance, puzzled by her behavior in recent days. She had grown withdrawn, distant, as if absorbed in thoughts she refused to share. At first, he had blamed it on fatigue — adapting to a world nearly two centuries removed from her own was no small feat. Yet his instincts told him it was something more.

He found her that evening standing before the Victorian mirror — the very one that had been her prison for over a century. She stood motionless, fingertips brushing delicately across the cracked surface as if caressing an old scar. The nearly full moon cast a silver light over the scene, giving it an almost surreal quality.

"Lucille ?" he murmured as he approached.

She didn’t startle. Perhaps she had sensed his presence, or perhaps she was too lost in contemplation to be surprised.

"Don’t photograph me anymore, Isao," she said suddenly, without turning her gaze from the mirror.

Her voice was calm but firm, stripped of the usual gentleness she reserved for him. A pang of anxiety tightened in Isao’s chest.

"Why ?" he asked, trying to hide the unease her request stirred in him.

Lucille turned slowly. In the dim light, her eyes shimmered with restrained emotion, tears threatening to fall.

"Because I no longer know who I am," she finally replied.

The silence that followed stretched endlessly, heavy with unspoken thoughts and unanswered questions. Lucille walked across the room with slow, deliberate steps, heading toward the wall where Isao had carefully framed the first glass plate that had captured her image with clarity. That image marked the beginning of their story — the moment the invisible became visible, when the ghost took form.

She unhooked it with precise, almost ritualistic movements and studied it intently. Her face in the semi-darkness was unreadable.

"For over a century, I’ve been nothing but an image," she murmured, more to herself than to Isao. "A muse for Adrien, a ghost for you, a curiosity to the modern world."

With a sudden gesture that contrasted with her apparent calm, she hurled the frame to the floor. The glass shattered into a constellation of fragments, scattering the moonlight into a thousand shards on the wooden floor.

"If only you could love me as something other than an image..."

Isao stood frozen, unable to react to the act of destruction that seemed to negate all they had shared. He wanted to speak, to protest, to tell her she was wrong. But the words vanished before reaching his lips when he saw Lucille raise her hand to her hair.

In a slow, ceremonial motion, she removed the silver hairpin that had held her hairstyle in place since her arrival in the present — a final relic of her past life. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders, released, just as she wished to be.

Then she took the scissors lying on Isao’s workbench. Without hesitation, she began cutting her long brown locks. Each snip echoed in the silent studio like an act of rebellion against a past that refused to let her go — against an image frozen in time.

The hair fell to the floor like shadows of the past being shed. Isao, both fascinated and horrified, couldn’t look away from this voluntary metamorphosis.

When she had finished, Lucille turned to a chair where a kimono lay folded — an accessory Isao sometimes used for portraits. With calm, precise movements, she slipped off her dress. There was no excessive modesty, only quiet determination. The rustle of fabric against her skin was the only sound breaking the silence.

She donned the midnight-blue kimono as if she had always known the gesture. The transformation was striking. Before Isao now stood a woman he barely recognized — or rather, he realized with a jolt, a woman he had never truly seen.

Lucille picked up a shard from the broken frame and examined her reflection in the makeshift mirror. Her now-short hair framed her face in a new way, giving her an air both vulnerable and strong. A timid smile appeared on her lips — the first in days.

"I’m no longer your ghost, Isao," she said gently. "I’m no longer Adrien’s muse. I’m not even Lucille Morel, the 19th-century French aristocrat."

She approached him, still holding the glass shard.

"If you love me only for what I represent, then you’re no better than Adrien."

These words, spoken without anger but with disarming honesty, struck Isao like a slap. He stepped back, breathless. The truth appeared to him in its cruel clarity: he had saved Lucille, but still viewed her through the prism of his art — as an ethereal creature, not as a flesh-and-blood woman with desires, fears, and aspirations.

Had he not, like Adrien, first been captivated by her image ? Had he not tried to capture her beauty like one pins a butterfly under glass ? Was the difference between them truly so great ?

"You’re right," he finally admitted, voice hoarse with emotion. "I gave up my artistic vision to free you, but I didn’t let go of the image I had created of you."

He took a hesitant step forward.

"I don’t know how to love you any other way, Lucille. Art has always been my language."

Lucille’s gaze softened. She let the shard fall, shattering it further.

"Then look at me, Isao. Not as a work of art, not as a ghost, not as a curiosity from another time. Look at me as a woman."

She took his hand and placed it on her cheek. Her skin was warm, alive.

"Can you feel the difference ? I’m no longer a reflection. I’m no longer a prisoner. I’m here, now."

Isao closed his eyes, letting his fingers trace the contours of Lucille’s face like a blind man learning the features of a loved one. He realized that despite their recent closeness, he was truly discovering the texture of her skin for the first time — the exact curve of her jaw, the slight asymmetry in her features that made her unique, not ideal.

"You’ve always searched for perfect light, the ideal framing," Lucille whispered. "But true beauty lies in imperfection — in what escapes control."

She guided his hand to the nape of her neck, where her cropped hair now revealed a small scar.

"Even in the mirror, I was imperfect, Isao. But you only saw what you wanted to see."

Isao’s eyes opened slowly. In the workshop’s dim light, Lucille’s face appeared to him anew. Without his artist’s gaze, without that superhuman sensitivity to light and shadow, he saw simply a woman — complex, real, alive.

"Now I understand," he said softly. "The sacrifice wasn’t just losing my artistic vision. It was also letting go of the idealized image I had of you."

Lucille nodded, relieved to finally be understood.

"Adrien never saw me either," she murmured. "He only saw his own creation, his fantasy. My whole life, I’ve been defined by the gaze of men."

She turned to look at the Victorian mirror, its cracks now forming a complex web across its surface.

"Even in captivity, I was only a reflection of your desires. Now, I want to exist for myself."

Isao suddenly understood the true weight of their story, the scale of what still lay ahead. Lucille’s physical liberation had only been the beginning of a deeper journey — her complete emancipation.

"The next ritual," she added, her gaze falling on the scattered fragments of the photographic plate, "will be to free myself from every image ever made of me — including yours, Isao."

She held out her hand, a gesture both simple and immense in its meaning.

"Are you ready to help me become fully myself, even if that woman doesn’t match your ideal muse ?"

Isao hesitated for a fraction of a second, then took her hand.

Outside, the moon reached its zenith, bathing the room in an almost supernatural glow. In the cracked mirror, their entwined silhouettes seemed to vibrate with a new energy — as if the universe itself had just witnessed their vow.