After you concentrate awhile on the self-awareness, you realize you need other-awareness too. That’s how you begin to figure out life, and figuring it out, appreciating it, seems to be the assignment. You try to connect with someone else. You see that we’re forever trying to connect with someone else, starting with our parents and our siblings. Poor material us, built of protons and electrons, made of millions of tiny particles, nothing ever touching anything else. Matter appears solid; that’s all. If you moved slowly enough, carefully enough, you could no doubt slip your cells through the interstices of this wall…

I ended as a prisoner-of-war. Loot. A prize. Booty. The commander-in-chief got to take me to his chamber. And now to his home. To his death and mine, but of course he won’t listen to me about that. Of course not.

I don’t know why I was selected. I saw one sister dragged away to be murdered on a grave. I watched my mother transformed by her grief into a hellhound. I know my best sister-in-law was carried off like me (and I see that she will live and even be a little happy again). But I was picked to be the leader’s special. Perhaps for my freckles. Perhaps for my friendship.

This man is no brute. He’s a boyish man’s man, and a perfunctory lover. Maybe he’s such a good general because he knows well how to talk to men. He doesn’t know what to say to a woman.

But I’m easy to talk to. I’m perceptive, and I’ve spent much of my life dealing with men like him. So we talked. We talked and he felt better, and finally he began feeling me. He massaged my neck and shoulders. He seemed to excite himself when he cupped one of my breasts and nibbled a nipple, and his hand made ever larger swooping moves in the vicinity of my hips, but someone must have once warned him well away from her loins. He hesitated… and did not touch. And I, a prize-of-war, did not teach. I accommodated, and we had mediocre sex.

He thought it was better than that. Or he liked the talking. He kept me in his cabin all the voyage to his home, and he tried to use my body twice a day.

Now we’ve landed, and I’ve seen his wife, and I’ve seen his cousin who has been here to make the wife happy all these years. We’ve reached his home, where his wife and her lover will kill us both, and I’ve tried to warn him, but he doesn’t heed me. Of course.

Ultimately, what you find out, I think, is that even if you’re self-aware you have no real existence unless you are perceived by another. It is imperative, first, that you attend yourself, and get to know yourself, and keep waking yourself up. But you can’t do it alone. You can’t exist without trying to describe the experience of your existence, and to make that description you need an audience. You need a mirror. You need another perspective.

So the answer, now that we’ve cruised up down and around, is You. You are what mattered most of all.

You.