My need to move my anxious feet first became urgent when I was reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. It was as though Seneca himself appeared behind the kindly professor at his desk who was holding forth on my thesis. An antique glass paperweight sat atop the stack of paper which was my graduate work. The same kind of paperweight that my mother had made me sell to disgusting Mr. Burgess at his antique shop. The glass twinkled in the sunlight.

The past found me there and it was unbearable. It was time to dash. It seemed like a hallucination, a voice speaking which I alone heard: Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come . . .

The professor was a cloud of frizzy grey hair and a soft English accent. Behind him Seneca appeared like a stray cherub, a rotund man in a toga. He was there before me, hovering a bit to the left like the great Gazoo, the tiny wizard in The Flintstones. At first I thought I might still be drunk — it had been a long, late night drinking at the Seahorse. Only I could hear him as he began a recitation. But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Letter CV — the Roman numeral for 105. I knew it. Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium. Seneca’s moral advice to the young Lucilius. I had read the book over and over again the previous year.

I blinked and Seneca was gone. My professor too. I was alone in my mind’s eye. In the ramshackle Victorian house at the edge of the Mountain, the house my mother had inherited from an old spinster great-aunt. But not the rare antiques inside. Long-lost relatives who did inherit the antiques but who were never located by the lawyer. Surrounded by wealth we couldn’t touch. Encircled by the tower of bills and collection notices. Relentless phone calls. We would lose the house. Nowhere to go. Haggard mother with red eyes sending her daughter with antique paperweight to antique dealer. Do whatever he asks. He’ll give you the best price. Do whatever he asks, Seraphina.

I did.

I bolted out of the gentle professor’s office. I vamoosed down to the harbour. I scampered along the waterfront watching container ships. My heart was pounding. The past was creeping from the Valley to the peninsula, finding me in the harbour city. I flashed up the hill and fled home. Panting, out of breath, going so fast my thoughts scrambled. My mind’s eye could not see but my mind heard me chanting, “Never look back, never look back. Only forward, only forward.” It’s my own little aphorism, my mantra, to keep my mind whirring.