Wednesday, August 13

It is Wednesday, two days before I might take the 2 pm bus to Cassis. It is a cooler day and I have finished my work with Martin Phoenix. The little red circles have covered his whole body, just like the French doctor said they would. Pityriasis Versicolor. The cornstarch hasn't helped. Clearly my mother does not know everything.

The sky does not look as though it is going to rain, so I get the white bicycle and follow the red-and-white trail into the woods. I have been here before in real life and in dreams, but this time I am determined to get to the end of the path where there is a road, according to the map. If I do not find the road, I will not be able to go up the mountain and I think the view will be better from up there.

When the path becomes too rough, I carry the bicycle over rocks, an old stream bed, huge tree roots, and a sharp ridge. A downward turn and the trail is scattered with horse manure, which I navigate around. Martin Phoenix would like this, I think. I continue, and in six minutes I see what I have been looking for. A road.

The road winds around through vineyards and lavender fields. I stop when I see something glimmering in the ditch, and it is a broken mirror. It is a small one, maybe a rearview mirror from a motorbike. All the pieces are in the frame and it looks like some kind of puzzle. When I look into it, all I see are pieces of me.

I think of Jean-Paul Sartre's little book. Who am I? Am I someone, anyone, or no one? Last fall, when I read Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, I thought about spending your life waiting. What if I was waiting for no one, and the no one was me? I don't want to be waiting for anyone, but the trouble is that I don't know whom to stop waiting for. I used to be waiting for boyfriends, but now I know that I don't need a boyfriend to be an adult. Then I waited for a job, but now I know that just having a job doesn't make you independent. I also know that it's hard to stop waiting when you don't have all the facts.

Near the broken mirror is a French cigarette package. Smoking is bad and whoever left this here is double bad— once for smoking, and once for littering. I take photographs of the cigarette pack, the broken mirror, and the red-andwhite trail. These will be important pictures to store in the album that I will make to show other people the details of my trip. I can keep the images in my head, like frozen pictures or movies, but it's hard to show these to other people without a photo album. Photo albums are kind of like rearview mirrors for family and friends. They let people look behind you at things that have already happened.

When I pause on the hillside and look toward the village, I am surprised and pleased. I am looking at the scene in the painting on the wall of my bedroom. I stand for a long time and look. I try to really see what is there. At the same time, I am also seeing things that the painter missed. I see the view in layers just like the painter created in the watercolor, but I also see pieces that are missing. When I get back to the villa I will do a sketch of my own. It will show all of this and so I do not need to use any more words about it here.

As I turn back toward home, I see a different road connecting to the one I'm on. I discover that it leads closer to the villa than the trail through the woods, and I am glad to take it. One way carrying the white bicycle was enough. I am glad to be done for now with the forest.

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep," I have heard Luke Phoenix quote from a poem by Robert Frost. "But I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep. Robert Frost, 1923." The woods here are not exactly lovely. They are just a place that you have to forge through in order to get somewhere else. I wonder if sometimes life is like that, with places you just have to get through in order to be anywhere at all.