You’ve always felt like your face looked different in the middle of the night. When you’d wake up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom you’d try to avoid looking in the mirror above the sink, or in your hallway. You noticed it sometimes out at bars or parties too when you’d go to the bathroom to check your makeup. But it wasn’t as unnerving when it happened while you were out drinking because you could attribute that strange feeling to the booze. But at home, there wasn’t anything to explain it away. It was just you, in an empty house, being afraid of your own reflection. So you decide you’re old enough to get rid of this silly little fear, and one night when you’re washing your hands, you stare at your reflection, and it stares back. You study its eyes, and you know they’re your eyes but they don’t feel like it. You’re always so careful in your life, so measured. You never do anything on impulse. So you carefully decide to let yourself have this one. You smash the mirror, and it feels good. You're smashing that silly childhood fear. But behind the mirror, you find a very serious adult fear. Your reflection is gone, but staring back at you is the blinking light of a camera. You rip it out, and on the tape, you find; the podcast inside your house.

Though the wind was disappointing, the sun was infinitely more important and that part was right. Leona had brought her ‘good camera’, which made me nervous in a boat, especially since I was the one paddling. But I relaxed when we finally found a spot to land. There wasn’t anything special about the spot we picked but I’d felt drawn to it. It was an inlet just like hundreds of others on the lake, but that didn’t make it any less lovely. The forest at the lake's edge was mostly pine. The bed of needles on the ground was almost soft enough to skip the blanket, but we laid it down anyway. We were setting up for a long day.

Leona and I had lunch but didn’t talk much. We both loved just listening to the birds when we were out in the woods. We laid in the sun for a bit and watched the water. We saw more people than we expected paddling by. On any other day, a visit to the lake brought total isolation, but on a day when even the animals looked up at the sky a bit of a crowd was to be expected. 

An hour before totality Leona started fiddling with her camera. She said she was going to check the focus, then let it run, snapping pictures every few minutes. Since it was too windy to get a reflection of the eclipse in the lake, she wanted to get a picture of it between the tree branches. We packed up our stuff and I took one last look at the lake. Just a short paddle away was another couple in a canoe. I was struck by how much the man looked like me, even down to the plaid shirt. Though his shirt was green and mine dark red. I stared for just a minute, but when they looked over I looked away. 

The pine trees made everything quiet. Just a few steps in and we couldn’t hear the waves of the water anymore. We followed a game trail and I found myself tripping over the forest floor much more than usual. I’d heard we wouldn’t be able to see the moon until it touched the sun but I was still looking up at the sky every now and then. But I wasn’t looking up enough to be stumbling the way I was. 

We found a clearing just a few minutes in. Leona wandered the edge for a bit, trying to find the spot where the branches best framed the sun. She put on her eclipse glasses early to protect against her brief glances upward. I donned mine as well, though we still had a little time. They were fun. 

As Leona looked up, I looked around. The clearing was mostly grass and flowers but there were small trees coming back up all over it. It didn’t seem like a natural prairie, the forest was taking it back. I wondered what used to be there. As the moon’s edge touched the sun, I had my answer. 

Off at the far end of the field, I spotted an old building. It was either a small cabin or a large shack. I pointed it out and Leona said we’d go explore it afterward. She’d found her perfect spot in the trees and had her timer going. I laid down in the grass next to her tripod. After a bit of messing with her camera, she joined me. As the world around us started to grow dark, the birds stopped chirping and the insects quieted. We held hands and enjoyed the silence, until it was broken by voices in the distance. 

Leona stood up to check her camera, making sure it was adjusting to the light. I stood up as well to see who had joined us in the woods. 

It was the couple I’d spotted earlier. They were walking to the shack. Leona waved and yelled “Hello!” but only the girl looked up. She stopped walking, they both stopped talking and the man, who’d looked so much like me, paused to see what she was looking at. And as we all looked at each other, we realized we were witnessing something much more strange and wondrous than even the eclipse above. The man across the field did not just look like me, he was me. The girl with him was a mirror image of Leona, but instead of her hair being long and violet it was short and bleached blond. 

The man was the first to look away, and he asked the girl, “What is it?”

She responded with, “I just thought I saw something. Over there.” She pointed at us, Leona’s hand still raised in a wave. 

He watched a bit longer, looking near us but not at us.Then, they both started to walk away. Leona and I exchanged glances for only a second before following them. The sun started to go black as we sprinted across the field. 

The distance was short, but Leona was fast. She ran ahead of me, careless and determined,  but she tripped. I caught up to her just too late to catch her and watched her reach out to grab a young tree for support. Then I watched her arm pass through the tree, as she fell to the ground. 

I picked her up and simultaneously we both reached out to touch the tree but found we couldn’t. We gave each other the same look we gave when we heard something on the front porch at night, or when we were in the woods and we heard something big cracking branches. The look that said something was wrong, but we didn’t yet know what. 

We walked back to the shack, more cautious. The couple, us somehow, was standing outside of it and talking. 

My doppelganger was telling Leona’s about how his father used to bring him to this lake, to this cabin as a child. 

My father died when I was a baby, in a car wreck that my mother had barely survived. We understood then, or at least we thought we did. 

“In another life.” Leona whispered, “We still found each other.” She squeezed my hand, and I felt more at ease. Something strange was happening. Perhaps something miraculous, even if it was a bit scary. Just like the sky above us, or perhaps, because of it. 

We moved in closer. As my twin was talking about some kind of fishing trip, Leona reached out to tap his shoulder. Her hand passed straight through him. 

As I looked at the shack, it was like I could see both our worlds if I squinted just right. We’d lost both our glasses in the field, but it felt like the same effect. As if I could see back to where we’d come from as long as a didn’t look straight at it. In their world the shack was new, but if I squinted I could just see a rusted padlock on the outside and the rotted door of the entrance. 

They stepped in and we followed quickly. As Leona-in-another-life looked around the room, my doppelganger closed the door. The cabin was small, but it looked loved. There was a bed on one side and a small kitchen on the other. The finish on the wooden walls was still shiny, and there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight. It even smelled slightly of bleach, like the other me had just cleaned it. Both Leona’s made a beeline for the far wall where pictures were hung up. Their world had a padlock on the cabin door as well, but this one was on the inside and it was shiny and new. I stayed back with myself and watched him lock the door. Both Leona’s turned around, smiling, but I was uneasy. Neither one seemed to notice what had happened. 

Myself and I walked over to see what they were looking at. The wall was covered in pictures of my father and me as I’d grown up in this life. Some were taken at the cabin, holding up fish. Others were various milestones: my first day at school, a trip to Disneyland, camping somewhere with mountains. My mother wasn’t in any of the pictures with us, but, near the edge of the wall there was a picture of her when she was young. 

“How old were you when she passed?” blond Leona asked.

“I was just a baby,” my twin answered. “I don’t remember her, but I wish I did.”

I squinted, trying to see if anyone else had put their pictures up in the cabin in our world but I saw only rotted wood. It made me sad that I’d never known about this place, which apparently had been so special to my father before he died. 

“Are you and your dad still close?” Asked Leona.

“More than ever,” I answered. “He taught me everything I know.”

They went to sit on the bed, and my Leona came over to me. 

“I’ve never gone blond before,” she said, “but it’s kind of working for me.” 

“It’s definitely working for me,” I said, and we laughed. She grabbed my hand, and we sat on the floor, unsure of what furniture we could touch. We watched ourselves for a time as the sky lightened outside the windows. They talked like a couple on their third date or so, they knew only a few things about each other, but they were comfortable. 

We learned about Leona in her other life, and what she would have been. She was studying nursing of all things. She’d dabbled in art but laughed at the idea of a career in it when other me asked. They talked about bands and movies, my taste was largely the same, but hers was so different. I wondered what had happened in their world that she’d turned out so much more practical. This seemed like a Leona who hadn’t run away when she was sixteen. This Leona was wearing a tank top but I didn’t see any scars on her arms. 

I’d often wished I could take away the things that had hurt my Leona. But, she wouldn’t be my Leona without them. Though I guess, even in another life, we still had each other in a way.  

I’d forgotten about my earlier unease completely. That was until the questions my green-shirted self was asking other Leona started to become more specific. Then they became too specific. No, she hadn’t told any of her friends about me, it was still so new. She didn’t have class again for two more weeks. She’d meant to text her friends about hanging out after we got back, but she forgot. She joked that I’d better have told my friends where we were going in case we got lost. Otherwise, no one would know where we were. And as she looked more and more nervous, she remembered, oh she actually had plans with her friend Amy tomorrow, and she’d be really worried if she didn’t show up. 

My Leona let go of my hand as the other me pulled out a knife. When her other self started crying, my Leona tried to help, but it was useless. We were just looking into this world, it wasn’t ours. 

“Do something!” She yelled at me. Her doppelganger turned her head toward the sound like she’d managed to hear us. But it was too late. 

Like watching someone jump from a roof, or watching a car explode, we couldn’t look away. As the outside grew brighter, we both watched in horror at what I would have been. Only when Leona’s double stopped screaming, and then stopped breathing, did the walls around us become bare and rotten, lit by the sun that had come out at last. 

Until next time: Remember to always carve out a little “me time” into your routine, we all need to relax now and then to stay our best selves.