The Pool
Never Blinks

It's 11:14 on a weeknight and you're reading something you wrote three hours ago. Not for typos. You're listening to how you sound.

You know this story. You know it wrong, because it got filed under vanity two thousand years ago and nobody's checked the file since.

Narcissus was beautiful. That part's true. When he was born, a prophet told his mother he would live a long life on one condition: that he never come to know himself. Everyone hears that as a riddle. Hold on to it. It's the whole story.

One day, kneeling at a pool, he saw the image and stayed.

Here's the detail the vanity version cuts out. Partway through, in the oldest telling, he figures it out. I am he. He says it out loud. He knows the face is his own reflection, knows there is no one in the water, knows exactly how this ends.

He stays anyway.

Because by then, leaving doesn't feel like walking away from a stranger. It feels like abandoning something that can't survive unattended.

He didn't fall in love with himself. He fell into maintenance.

You worship this god more faithfully than he was ever worshipped in a temple. The sent message, reread for tone. The post, consulted at a red light to see how it's being received. The profile, tended like a grave that has to look good for visitors. Your own name, typed into a search bar with the door closed. The version of you that lives in other people's heads, fed first, fed best, fed tonight.

The reflection eats first.

Somewhere behind him, the whole time, a voice kept saying his own last words back to him. He never turned around. The only sound he could recognize by then was himself, repeated.

And the ending. He doesn't drown. Drowning would at least be contact with the water. He starves, kneeling at a full pool, in a green place with food in every direction. The image needed him and the image could not feed him, and of those two facts he could only keep one in view.

When they came for the body, there was no body. Just a small flower at the water's edge, bent toward its own reflection.

Not even a grave. A posture.

So go back to the prophecy, the one everyone hears as a riddle. A long life, if he never comes to know himself. It sounds like self-knowledge is the poison. Read it again from the bank of the pool.

He stared at himself longer than any man who ever lived, and he died never knowing himself at all. Watching isn't knowing. The pool never taught him one thing about the man kneeling at it. It couldn't. A mirror shows you what's there. The pool shows you what you keep.

You can monitor yourself for years and never once meet yourself. Those are different acts. One of them happens at the surface. The other one was available the entire time, in the body doing the kneeling, hungry, ignored, real.

One thing.

The image can survive a night unattended. It was never the one starving.

Tonight, when your hand goes for the thing you wrote, the post, the name in the search bar, let the water sit. Nobody is going to maintain the reflection.

Notice who's still there when nobody is.