I Caught My Reflection in the Microwave Door at 9pm. The Woman in the Glass Looked Switched Off.
By Eleanor W. · June 21, 2026
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It was nine o'clock and I was heating my tea, the way I do every night, and the microwave glass went dark for a second between the light switching off and the plate turning. And there she was. Me. Reflected back in that black glass.
She looked switched off. Not sad. Not unwell. Just set to low — like a lamp on a dimmer somebody had turned down years ago and never turned back up. I stood there longer than the tea needed.
I have a game I play, if you can call it that. I ask myself: when did you last want something? Not need. Not should. Want. And that night I couldn't find the answer, and I realized I hadn't been able to find it for a long while. I'd been quietly filing myself away under contentment, because the real word for it frightened me too much to say out loud.
My gynecologist had a pamphlet for it. "Just part of the change," she said, in the voice you use for weather. I took the pamphlet. I did not read it. I went home and heated my tea.
Here's the part I didn't expect to matter. My sister Ruth is four years older than me, and for a long time Ruth had been the one I worried about. She used to say she felt like she was watching her own life through a window — there, but on the other side of the glass, unable to reach the handle.
Then one Sunday she was in my kitchen, and out of nowhere she looked at me — really looked — and said, "El. Do you still feel like you're behind glass?"
I didn't answer fast enough, which was its own answer. And she said, gently, like it was nothing, "I haven't in months."
Months. She said it the way you'd mention the weather turning warm. And I felt something in me sit up that hadn't sat up in a very long time.
Now, I am not a hopeful woman by nature. So I did what I always do when someone offers me a door — I started listing every reason it couldn't possibly be a door. And Ruth, bless her, let me run all the way out.
"Is it the candle-and-a-glass-of-wine thing," I said. "Because that's just setting a pretty table. It doesn't make you hungry."
"It's not that," she said.
"Is it one of those powders. I choked maca into a smoothie for a month once. One thing, one lane. Did absolutely nothing."
"Not that either."
"Then it's the willpower speech. Just decide to want it." I could hear how tired I sounded. "Willpower's just you performing. I'm too old to perform."
Ruth waited until I'd emptied out every excuse I'd been carrying. Then she said, "You handed me all of those so you wouldn't have to feel hopeful. I know, because I did the same thing." And she told me what it actually was.
What Ruth explained — and it wasn't what I expected
The wanting, she said, doesn't retire when you get older. It isn't a personality change. It isn't you becoming a calmer, quieter person. It's physical.
After a certain age the body simply runs low on the raw material the spark is built from — the same way it runs low on so many other things it used to make freely and stopped bothering to. The feeling doesn't leave. The supply does.
And Desire Bites, she said, doesn't add anything fake or force anything that isn't yours. It puts back four things the body quietly stopped making enough of. Four different herbs, working four different lanes at once. Not one trick that promises the world. Four.
What happened next
I ordered them the way you order anything you don't want a witness to — quietly, late, half-hoping I'd forget. The deep-purple box arrived a few days later in plain, discreet packaging. No one at my door raised an eyebrow. I set it in the drawer and left it two more days out of sheer stubbornness.
The first evening I actually tried them was an ordinary one. Greg was doing the crossword. The kettle was on. Nothing was set up, nothing was staged — which is exactly why I remember it.
He passed behind me at the counter, the way he's passed behind me ten thousand times, and I reached up and held his hand. Not because it was expected. Because I wanted to. He stopped. He looked at me like he'd found something he'd misplaced, and he said, quietly, "There you are."
There you are. Two words. I hadn't realized I'd gone somewhere until somebody welcomed me back.
The microwave is still there. It still goes dark at nine o'clock between the light and the turn of the plate. But the woman in the glass looks back at me now. Not switched off. Just — on again, at whatever setting is honestly mine.
Ruth was right about the excuses, too. I'd handed her every one so I wouldn't have to feel hopeful. And the thing about a 90-day guarantee is that it takes the excuses away, one at a time. I had three months to decide. Worst case, I sent back a box. That's not a leap. That's just opening the drawer.
