Day Zero

He looked in the mirror and the man he saw was different. His face was a bit fatter, his eyes deeper-set. A few additional wrinkles had appeared around the edges. He was beginning to look a lot like his father.

He was older; that's the main thing. Was he wiser? Maybe. Wearier, certainly. And I'd speculate to say he was, secretly, a bit cagier. Cagier about his life, his career, and what he needed to do to be happy. It was the caginess of compromise, of humbly understanding one's immutable, deeply-penetrating, self-treasonous failures.

In return, he received a key that unlocks the door of a dirty, abandoned house deep within our conflict-ridden hearts. The house contains a desk in an upstairs office, and pinned upon that desk, beneath a brass paperweight, is a set of printed instructions for you to follow. The instructions tell you who you are and what you must do.

I guess you could say this: his face, in those few seconds of that oblique, snakelike truth, and in the expressionless expression that sucker-punched his soul -- was the face of one of life's classic exchanges: a bit of joy, a bit of pride, and a bit of hope offered at the gate -- the entrance to a new land. A new life, somewhere closer to Cafe Yannis.

A new life wrought from the old. A new place: a field, cold and fresh. Fog on the horizon. What shall this place be called? I asked myself this as I turned away.