Where Here Is

Still from a French film, L,Etranger (The Stranger), directed by Francois Ozon, 2025

I’ve dropped something this morning but nothing broke, and if something broke I didn’t break it. Furthermore, had it been broken I would have made up a story about it, perhaps even a little fib to keep me out of trouble.

I happen to admire the voice of the things I’ve dropped. Many times in my life I’ve gotten away with the sound of them dropping and breaking, especially when no one was listening or looking.

Lacan maintained that if you looked into the mirror it wasn’t just you you were seeing but a fractured reflection of who you thought you were; that the mirror reflected the many broken pieces of yourself, so many pieces that you had no idea of how they broke in the first place, or how you would be able to even begin to put all the fractured pieces together again so that they might resemble the original image you thought you saw in the mirror.

Here touches me every morning when I first wake up. I am here, I don’t have to look around for it, I know I’m alive even if something else about me, as seen in some close or distant mirror, has been broken.