Your anxiety is understandable:

how much time has passed since last you looked upon yourself? The glass turns, the natural world comes to focus, the sky, the trees, the beach fall into reflected view. Is what you see in the glass the realer life, all the rest mere fantasy?

Your hand, embarrassingly, trembles. Take a breath. Be brave. Turn it a bit more. Go on.

Before your eyes lock with your eyes, a strange thing happens, a sort of novelistic flood of sensations zooming your veins and nerves, a wave breaking within you, through you. The sensation recalls younger times, a much less civil you, more rebellious. Too much grog at the tavern despite the sidelong smirks of other barflies, your voice growing louder and louder until the barkeep asked you to leave, thence you stalked the town square, shaking a fist at passsersby yes but really at existence … and now you feel it again, the damp drizzly November of the soul, that temptation to cry out, to condemn, to attack, to flee.

Your mind is so, so brittle. Look at you. You’re in a maddening daze here on this the beachhead of your new life, malnourished, dehydrated, sun-beaten, of course you feel a plummeting ice-water shock right now, just as you’re about to see yourself for the first time in years, as the wave yet courses through you, bringing strange images and dreamscapes … strangers in the street, gazing up at you for help … ships in harbors, setting sail to worlds of final escape … a foreboding voice of another whispering into your ear all your life, the face eternally blurred … waters lapping about you, rushing up your legs, your waist, the cold creep along your chest and throat, past your mouth, your eyes … unwanted critical feedback on your recent draft … all the images crash and crash … you see yourself falling into deeper darknesses, spiriting down narrow poorly lit halls, the floors damp, sounds of murmurs all about you … and at the end of each hall, through a dark doorway, someone is waiting … they speak just a few words, in a tongue you don’t recognize … they hand you directions folded on a slip of paper. Your dream-tongue is dream-thick in your dream-mouth so of course you cannot dream-speak, out the door you go, rushing all through the night, rushing through dream after dream, doorway after doorway. So many faces, so many places, and in all the manyeyes, you see something that tightens your stomach—

Your own expression, lil ol‘ you, looking right back at you.

And you pass out.

Mid-morning you come to consciousness once again face-down in the beach’s soft, powdery sands. Like the second first day of the rest of your life. The tenth. The hundredth. Your head aches as if jungly animals have been scraping at your skull, spooning out the last bites of your brainstew. Your body feels tossed about and uncoordinated, slow to do your mind’s bidding. You think: Wake up. Open your eyes. Your eyes open. Your limbs don’t respond. All you can do is turn over, blinking. The sun shines too high in the sky. You are desperate with thirst, and you know full well that existence doesn’t care the slightest fucking whit about you, and ain pulses your ribs and innards, and when you half-sit up it makes you breathless, and you try to fight off the sick pangs but can’t, and you half-crawl to the surf and let the waves take it all from you. The momentary relief makes you even shakier, but it’s relief all the same. You gargle seawater, rinse yourself, manage to stand, and limp back to your hut.

As you make your way, you kick something hard. The mirror.

Aching, you lean down and grasp it.

This time fearlessly, you face your own reflection.

Well surprise, surprise. You are, somehow, clean-shaven. Your hair is neatly trimmed. You’re a bit sun-touched about the face, but—and you hold the mirror farther away, looking at your nude body—you’re quite fit. You check your eyes: clean white. Your tongue: healthy red. Somehow you look younger, the crow’s feet recently scuttling your temples are brushed away. Your hair is lighter, too, pleasantly sandy-colored. Interesting.

Grasping the mirror closely, you go into your hut. A set of clothes has been laid out—were these also in the satchel? Did you set them out in your daze? You pull them on and they fit your form nicely, and already you feel the old giddiness of privilege, these are fine fabric, soft and rich, and the jacket has a dark shimmer to it, the shoes shined to a deep-space black. You button the shirt, snap your sleeves, tidy the collar, and you feel each second more yourself, or anyway the person you once were—and suddenly, second by second, all this time here, pleasant though it’s been, is fading into hazy dream, afternoon siesta, summer read.

Look at you: all dressed up, everywhere to go.

Tighten your shoelaces, brush the sand from your shoulders. Adieu and adieu to this pleasant life and this placid you, stride away from the beach, deeper inland. Press into the jungle, pull your shoes from the suck of mud, step over thick tree roots that bang your shins, through gray-green ferns bejeweled by dew in the scant morning light. Nothing can slow you down, babe. You’re so enervated. You have a goal. What is it exactly? Other than to move forward and do something different, who cares, that’s plenty enough. Purpose isn’t the key to existence, even if it fits a few locks. Eventually the jungle thins, and you hear the muttering sounds of civilization, planes in sky, cars on road. You find a highway, the clean oily emptiness of it, the graded earth, the absence of vegetal chaos. You find a bus stop and sit on the bench, waiting. You check your coat pockets—nice: a billfold fat with several crisp currencies, and as you look at the man on one of the bills, you can’t help but laugh; in a way, he looks like you.

Next stop this way.