I met Carmen when I wasn’t well and had gone to the lake for the second time. The first time I went was ten years ago, when I still thought life would bring me things. Life had seemed to bring other people things, and I thought it might bring them to me. I didn’t know it was too late for all that, even though I was still very young.

I met Dwain in the expat bars, and it was through Dwain that I met Carmen. Carmen had lived at the lake all her life. When I first met her, she seemed like a queen. She was haughty and she was arrogant and she had the most beautiful hair. Later on, I saw her differently, but that was how she seemed when we first met.

I went to the lake because my life in New York hadn’t worked out, and my life before that hadn’t worked either. On the outside I seemed to be functioning well, but inside I had the feeling that nothing had meaning and also that everything was fake. Even the waves of the sea looked fake. I knew the waves of the sea were real, but when I looked at them from the side of the boat on the way home from a camping trip, they looked fake, as though we were on a movie set and the sea was a giant swimming pool and the sun was electric light. Nothing seemed real, and to feel real, I imagined, was the fundamental thing, the thing you needed before anything else can begin. I thought if I was going to fix my life, I would need to get to where things felt real.