Narcissus and the Reflection 

   Sunlight rebounded off the surface of the lake, beyond the sky, and into the void which borders the earth. The water remained still, occasioning unflawed reflections and speculations. Narcissus paused, and gazed into the water for an indeterminate amount of time. Then eight minutes passed, and it all changed.

     It arrived  as a  raindrop in front of my eyes. I saw it before I felt it. The projectile pierced the plane of the water, but water is liquid, more fluid than rigid, so the surface slipped away. A simple pattern propagated outward from the center where the drop had fallen. It had shape and frequency, simultaneously.  That raindrop and the others that followed, inscribed themselves upon the surface of the lake. It was peculiar that I had not noticed the surface before, now delimited by the light rain. And even more, that I had not noticed the difference between myself and the reflection. A fundamental distinction ignored! But  from distinctions, the initiation of meaning, differences perpetually  deferring, and the invention of  absence. Absence is nothing  if not the relative and imagined distance between two  entities. This is the manner in which the noumenon fractured. Surfaces appearing every place I looked. They separated one thing from another. Sometimes the surfaces were beautiful to look at, but most of the reflections had failed.