You are reflected
You are reflected into found situations. Through optical sleight, portions of your body, recognizable with their imperfections or the edge of a piece of clothing trailing into the tableau, become familiar with their surroundings. Your foot curves in its shoe over the narrow steel ring around the base of the stool which stands behind a counter. The counter has two sides which meet at a corner. The stool is behind the portion of the counter which is opposite a wall with two windows and a door. The inside surface of the door is painted dark brown. Your desk faces the window, the register tape, fed out of the top of the cash register which sits unadorned atop the counter.
Each action your body finds itself performing, when you awaken to its movement from long dazes, is one of these reflections, borne of an initial movement, your feet in the waves with bland morning sun on steel water, it retreats back across sand littered with bits of paper and cigarettes where each fold in the surface of the water, each crystalline grain of sand propels the reflection of that moment of you forward, onto another surface and another, running out across the horizon being shifted and recombined, another moment hours later, you stand near a table by a window which extends to just above the floor where steam rises from a teacup, the water vapour carries you and those yous out again where you meet that woman from the beach who stepped out of the water in sock feet and layed onto the hard low tide sands with her cheek on the sand looking out across the sand longways up the shoreline, and some others, bodies contained in fragments of glass and ridges of plastic, some sitting, collapsed, some only hands, or shod feet, and hair strung in front of burnt or weathered faces, or empty clothes, reflections that make you up behind the counter you tap listlessly on the keys of a metal cash register as the tape unfurls, a white penant in the breeze of all those breaths that pace the sunset. You tap the keys to corroborate the breaths, or to recall the motion, to fill the late afternoon with a purpose derived from some forgotten second, or era, or country.