Narcissus, indulged

A story of a beautiful boy who loved himself to death

Jul 03, 2025

This is in the same vein as Wrath, wrath, and Icarus, retold. If you enjoy my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription—it keeps my blog going and I’d be very grateful. :)

One afternoon in late winter, when the desert coughed up its false spring and the sands smelled briefly of marjoram and ash, I made my great departure from the palace, away from the grid of fountains and gardens filled with exotic maples whose leaves shimmered like pale silk under the Arabian sun, and toward the lake, which I had seen only a thousand times before and always from above, from the heights of my bedroom window.

The lake looked like a mirror, like a portal, nestled among patches of love-lies-bleeding and guarded by a tangle of trees that dropped their leaves not in season but in moods. The water looked like it remembers everything it touched, water that reflects not the sky but its own dreams of the sky.

I was, by all accounts, a handsome boy. But I haven’t taken a proper look at myself in years. In the water, on its surface, I saw him:

His forehead shortened not only because he had grown taller but because of the loose curls that drooped in swirls in front, like the long, black tails of panthers napping on Amazonian branches, and it had soft folds that rippled across its smooth surface from years of frowning and squinting.

His eyebrows were as thick and regal as I remember them, their ends pointing towards the cheekbones like Adam’s hand on the Roman ceiling, and they forced whoever was lucky enough to see them up close to look into the eyes that sat one story below—his eyes—his eyes kept the half-moon of palpebral creases, his lashes matched the raven of his hair, his dark irises—Hindu-hypnotic and washed over with a canine loyal lust for pretty things, slightly raised and hidden under the penumbra of lids that looked like they were never fully awake, like they were permanently glossed with boredom. Nothing ever really impressed me.

Eyes that only floated above the mediocrity of the world, upon meeting the angel leaning over the surface of the water, decided to ditch their reticence in their sockets to pierce their beautiful twin on the other side of the aqueous portal.

I was in love. Actually, I was so close to love that I knew I was going to fall into it, into its freshness, its rural innocence—my Daphnis, my Dorian, my Dionysus, my Dante, his face not in pieces but all at once, the full composition of it, the total image… I felt like I was remembering an ideal I had never seen but had always believed existed just past the limits of my own self-regard, and that ideal was now incarnate, now that Siddhartha was looking at me from the inside out, patiently waiting for me in the middle of the water.

Dear reader, all my former taste and judgment collapsed in front of him. The gaze of my angel, peeping through clouds of heliotrope and floating damask petals, confirmed something I had suspected all my life: that I was the only person who had ever been capable of loving me properly.

The euphoria of that realization hit me with a dizzy drop in the chest paired with a warmth so terrifying that for a moment I believed I might levitate or disintegrate, and the only thing I could do to keep myself from dying after the orgasmic pantheistic experience was to try to meet him, to touch him, so I fell face first into the water, I plunged into my mirage in the emirate, and my body returned to itself after an astral mistake.

Death stroked me gently with velvet gloves and convinced me to stay. He persuaded me quietly, not by arguing or seducing but by making the alternative feel tasteless, because what future could there be outside this moment of perfect symmetry, what life could compete with the convergence of beauty and stillness and self, what could be more utopian than the idea of remaining here?

The secrets at the bottom of the lake grabbed me by my ankles. I’ve never wanted to be drowned so badly in my life so I let my ophidian twin pull me under until the world blistered black. The water filled my lungs like mercury. Let it hush me. Let it hush everything. I was tired of noise, and Eros turned into Thanatos: I, Narcissus, in spite of my faithful imitation of a thousand diamond suns and infinite allure, had turned out, after all, to be mortal.

Truly,