The One in the Mirror

Robert and I had known each other since childhood. We went to the same elementary school, then to the same high school. We even enrolled at the same university, but somewhere around the third year we drifted apart. I had slowed down a little with my academic obligations, so he graduated before I did. Naturally, he found a job sooner too, and set out along the path of a career.

“Hey, where have you been? I haven’t seen you in years,” I said when I ran into him in town.

“Ah, here I am. I just got back from vacation. I still have another week off. How are you? Let’s grab a drink, no point talking in the street,” he answered cheerfully, relaxed, and invited me for a drink.

Since I had time as well, I was just coming back from training, we went to a café in the town center. I ordered coffee with milk and a glass of water. He ordered green tea.

“Green tea in this heat?” I noticed the oddity right away and began speaking as if we had last seen each other yesterday, although more than twenty years must have passed since I had seen him. It was a scorching day. The city asphalt was burning, thirty five degrees in the shade.

“A beer would sit better right now, like in the old days,” I added at once, almost making fun of my own choice of drink.

“Green tea calms me. It’s good for relaxation. And beer, well, alcohol in general, I don’t drink anymore. It’s harmful and it interferes with my…”

I cut him off with laughter when I remembered how much beer we had drunk while going to football matches, hanging around parties, wasting ourselves on youth. True, I do not drink that much anymore either. Those were the days of mad youth, after all. But I have not renounced a glass of good wine.

“Ah, that was once. We were crazy. But now, since I started working on myself, alcohol doesn’t really fit anymore.”

At that point my coffee almost sprayed out of my mouth. I choked, and suddenly it was no longer funny. The Robert I knew had achieved enviable professional and material success. He was the director of a large international company.

Working on himself. Hm. Wasn’t that…? Yes, of course, I knew what he meant. What kind of working on yourself now, what kind of spirituality, I thought. He noticed the way I was looking at him, as if I had just seen some otherworldly creature.

“You know, none of this makes any sense. All this chasing success, money, and for what, for whom? As long as you’ve known me, I was never a materialist. I only fulfilled my tasks and did my job as well as I knew how.”

“Well, maybe you weren’t. But that’s how everyone sees you. You’re good at it, intelligent and resourceful. It can’t exactly be said that success meant nothing to you.”

“Yes, but now I ask myself, for whom am I doing all this? If I leave everything to my children, what am I telling them? That the universe will hand everything to them on a platter, that they don’t have to make any effort? Who did I work for, the company? They earned ten times more from me. They only used me. And where am I in all of that? Where is my peace?”

He complained to me, and it seemed to me that something was eating him from within.

“And now I’ve had enough of everything. I’m looking for my peace. I want my peace. I want answers to those questions we used to ask as children, remember?”

“I remember very well, my Robert. I remember that child in me, and in you. Only that child in you grew up, just like your body did. And the child in me, hm, that child, that child is still a child. You see, the questions that trouble you now began troubling me already in high school,” I answered, perhaps too directly.

“I know. You started rebelling against the system. You were a young rebellious punk.”

“I was a punk because I truly rebelled, from within. I lived it. The crowd around me, for them it was fashion. I threw myself recklessly into a fight against the system. And you know what? If God Himself had not spared me from trouble, who would have saved me from the hand of the system? No one. And my dear punks, they were all children of rich and influential parents. They would have got out of it. You can fight the system only if you are crazy enough or rich enough.”

I remembered those days when I had been a rebel, and with reason, then continued.

“I understood very quickly that I was not rebelling against the system in society, but against the matrix, as spiritual people like to call it today.”

“Yes, yes… the matrix. You know… everything is somehow, I don’t know how to say it… as if you are living someone else’s life. As if the whole time you have been playing a role someone else wrote for you,” Robert interrupted me.

But very quickly I interrupted him too and continued.

“Oh, Robert, I wore myself out with that already at university, and it cost me the kind of life you live.”

“What do you mean, cost you? Are you envious of me?” Robert asked, surprised.

“No, I am not envious of you. Not at all. I mean that if I had not been occupied with spirituality since my youth, I would certainly have built a career like yours. After all, I was better and more gifted than you in mathematics and programming. But I did not care much for seriousness in life. I was looking for answers and explanations for the experience we went through together. Did you ever find an answer to what happened to us?”

I asked him if he remembered the experience from our boyhood, when we nearly drowned.

Robert’s face grew more serious, as if my question had confronted him with a business decision he had never fully resolved. He sank into thought. His eyes receded into some ancient depth from which we all arise, and in his pupils I could make out a small flame of light beginning to glow.

“I… hm… I almost forgot that. That light, that… how should I put it… that resetting of memory. I don’t know, I never…”

Robert spoke in fragments, stammering.

Only then did I see that he had experienced that moment differently. From this perspective, more than forty years later, I can see that it marked us both. Each of us lived through that experience in his own way, and each of us continued to live it in his own way.

It was not merely flailing arms and legs in a rough sea. It was a fight for life.

And that fight, then, we lost.

When they dragged us to shore and revived us, we were born again. Born again like twins who had come together from a faraway land. We brought that distance with us, and inside us, and we never truly returned. Even now I wonder whether we are really alive, or whether, somewhere over there, we are watching what might have been if we had had a little less courage and had not swum toward the open sea.

I remember it clearly. When we opened our eyes on the sand, the first thing we noticed was that everything was cloudy, that there was no light, although it was a clear summer afternoon.

The distant Sun we had brought with us was shining more brightly.

“That marked me, and all my life I searched for answers, for explanations. I neglected work. I did everything, true, but with half a force and little will, without real presence. My superiors noticed that, so I was never a beloved employee. I began doing my own jobs, earning just the minimum I needed to live. Something inside me cracked. And what do I have now? In essence, I have nothing. But I am. Now, how I am, that is a story for a novel.”

“Do you regret it?” Robert asked me again, the same question as before.

“Regret what?”

“Let’s say you could go back. Would you change anything?”

“You think you would have that possibility? Would this meeting then exist? We are here as we need to be.”

“Then why are you philosophizing?”

“I’m telling you so you don’t screw up the final stretch of the race. I made my mistake at the start.”

“Whatever we decide, the plan will be executed. That’s what we say at board meetings.”

“You know what the worst thing is, Robert? Sometimes it seems to me that spirituality is precisely what ruined my life. That hunger to explain everything.”

“Are you saying that spirituality is meant for rich and idle people, people who don’t know what to do with themselves because life feels empty, people like me?” Robert asked.

“My life was full, and I wanted bread beyond the loaf. That kind of spirituality, when it runs away from life, becomes atheism in the end. Do you understand?”

“Atheism? Don’t provoke me.”

“Yes. It is all flight from life, from living people.”

“And that, to you, is atheism?”

“What else is it? You are afraid of the cross the world will place on your shoulders when you turn your back on it,” I said.

“But that is spirituality, then. You have concluded something wrong. Transcending the material…”

Robert was just about to open up properly when I interrupted him.

“Oh, don’t talk bullshit now. Very few people have the guts for that. That is why everyone teaches and explains things. And to whom? To themselves. They look for excuses because they do not have the courage to live.”

“And then they only get more tangled up,” Robert concluded.

“Leave spirituality alone, Robert. Choose life.”

I looked at him, and it seemed to me that I knew him more deeply than one knows an old friend. Even our names had somehow bound us together. My mother had wanted me to be named Robert. My father had decided otherwise.

Robert looked at me for several moments without a word. Then he lowered his gaze into the cup, as if something in it had just sunk. He stood up quietly and said he was going to the restroom.

I waited for him a long time.

Two cups remained on the table, my coffee and his green tea, both half finished. The waitress came over and asked whether we needed anything else.

“The two of us are done,” I said, and only in my own voice did I hear something strange.

The waitress looked at me with mild unease, pressed her lips together, charged me for the bill, and left quickly.

I finished my coffee, then went to the restroom to wash my face.

I was hot. My shirt was wet with sweat. I cupped my hands, gathered water, and washed my face as if morning had only just broken. All this heat and humidity were truly dulling me, lulling me to sleep. As I splashed water onto myself, some of it went up my nose. I choked. I felt that I had drawn the water down into my lungs.

I remembered the drowning, and the fight.

And once again the light flashed.

I do not know how long it lasted, but in those moments I lived through everything again.

I continued washing my face. The cold water refreshed me. I lifted my head and saw Robert in the mirror.

His figure melted into mine, and I no longer knew where one of us began and the other ended.

I turned around.

Robert was not there.

I turned my gaze back to the mirror, where the play of changing reflections continued.

Which one am I?