Turn 12 of 15

I take a look at the full view mirror and for the first time, I feel pride instead of disgust.

I turn from the desk and see the full-length mirror mounted on the wall beside the pod, the one I stared into earlier with horror. I walk toward it slowly, my feet carrying me there without conscious thought. The woman in the reflection is not the woman who walked into this salon this morning. She is someone else entirely, someone who has been sculpted and finished, every rough edge smoothed away. I stop in front of the mirror and look. Really look. The bronze skin catches the ambient light, glowing faintly, and the thick lashes frame eyes that are calm and steady. The grey velour tracksuit fits like it was made for me, because it was, stitched from the same material as everyone else's, identical and unremarkable and strangely beautiful in its uniformity.

Something shifts inside me, a tectonic plate sliding into place. The old Gemma, the anxious one, the one who spent hours fretting over design briefs and colour palettes and whether her latest pitch was good enough, that Gemma looks at the reflection and feels a distant, fading revulsion. But the new Gemma, the one who has been tidied and polished and filled in, feels something else entirely. She feels satisfaction. She looks at the woman in the mirror and thinks, finally, that she looks right. That she looks finished. That she looks like someone who belongs somewhere.

I raise my hand and touch my face, feeling the smooth skin beneath my fingertips, the full lips, the heavy lashes that flutter when I blink. There is no fear. There is no disgust. There is a warm, spreading sense of completion, like the last piece of a puzzle clicking into place. I turn slightly, admiring the way the tracksuit moves with my body, the way the fabric catches the light. I look like the women outside, the ones who stand under the bus shelter and lean against the shop fronts, scrolling through their phones with an air of immense, unshakeable calm. I look like them. I am one of them.

The receptionist watches me from behind the desk, her smile no longer patient or pitying but genuinely warm, as if she is witnessing something she has seen a hundred times before but still finds moving. I meet her eyes in the mirror and I do not flinch. I do not look away. I hold her gaze and I feel the last flicker of the old Gemma, the real Gemma, the freelance graphic designer who lived above a tanning salon on a wet high street in the north of England, gutter and die. It does not go quietly. It kicks, once, twice, a last frantic pulse of something that might be grief or might be rage. And then it is gone, and I am left standing in front of the mirror, calm and still and complete.

I turn away from the mirror and walk back to the desk. The receptionist nods at me, a gesture of acknowledgement, of welcome. I stand beside the desk and fold my hands in front of me, just as she does. The pod hums softly in the corner. The music plays its low, repetitive beat. The sign outside glows white against the dark street. I am home. I am finished. I am exactly as I was meant to be.