What your face stopped doing

Find a mirror before the day's out. Before you look, run back through the last few hours. No patting a pocket for a cigarette. No planning an exit from the conversation. No angling your face away from someone you love. No math on how long until the next chance. Nothing about today needed hiding.

Now look. Skip the skin and the teeth. Look at the eyes and the jaw. You're hunting for something that's gone. The background math. The lookout who always ran half a step ahead, managing the next hour, timing the next exit. That lookout has gone off duty.

Hiding is expensive, and you paid in attention. The cigarette skimmed a slice off conversation after conversation, and you called the tiredness a long week. God saw every hidden minute and didn't look away. Then He lifted the weight, one ordinary day at a time. What's left is open in a way nobody can fake.

Give it ten seconds. You're not there to admire anything. You're there to register a fact. Then walk back into your day and hold someone's eyes a beat longer than you used to. Notice how little it costs now. Nothing to time, nothing to explain, nowhere else to be.