-He rolls over in his bed, his eyes moving rapidly underneath his thin, almost translucent eyelids. The rain outside crashes against the window, a stampede of ants, crushing any possibility of seeing the world outside.
With a sudden snap, his eyelids roll back in his head and he exhales a long frothy breath. A cloud with a haze, taken from the moment of waking, the stealing moments of dreams. He breathes heavy as he sits there, the blanket strewn to the ground. It’s the same blanket that has been there every morning at his waking; the same blanket that he neatly and methodically tucks under him and around him every night before he drifts off into sleep. Into the short bursts sessions of rapid eye movement and foggy images that never end up making any sense in the morning. He glances at the window, the breath escaping him each moment more painful, almost intentionally hurtful as each inhalation consumes the cold winter scent. There are shapes, or almost shapes behind the stampede of water cascading against the fogged glass. For a moment, except for the blanket, he is completely displaced and wonders if perhaps he is someone else.
He’s thought about it often, often thinks about it thoroughly, being someone else. He’s closed his eyes on days when the sun pours its gentle stream through the window and around the blinds. He’s sat there, with the beads of sweat forming and falling down the length of his forehead. Imagining. What is it like to inhabit someone else’s shoes? He’s often mesmerized by the possibility and the intrinsic loss of self that would occur, disallowing the comparison to some else’s existence; but maybe there is the possibility of the lingering self. He’s wondered if there would indeed be any lingering, any self of the former self, left behind. There is really no way he could ever know this, but in the quiet moment, with his eyes closed, he’s imagined the lingering self loses itself in the subconscious, because he hopes that the lingering sense does indeed travel with you from body to body. And still, he lies there, still, concentrating. Trying to float, trying to find an exit from his own chamber, and if he could find an exit, he firmly believes he could easily then find an entrance into someone else.
Regulating his breathing he looks about the room, but in the dull light it may as well be any other room, as it indeed appears to him, to be just so. He looks down at himself and sees the same pale hands, dry and a little marked by time. He looks down at his midsection slightly protruding; he runs his hand down and pinches it. He smiles awkwardly, almost with relief and almost with disappointment. This is the body, the same body he closed his eyes in before just now. His memory starts to return to him, as the blood returns to the resting brain cells. He looks around the room again, this time recognizing the darkness and the shapes that lie inside of it. The memories of his night flash one by one, like strobes of consciousness during some altered state. But he was nothing more than tired last night, no drugs, no alcohol, not so much as a sleeping pill. If he would’ve had, the sleeping pill perhaps, he may not be having these flashes now.
The alarm clock reads 1:11AM in its read haunting letters and there’s a small black spot on the wall. It’s moving. It disappears.
The red numbers are blurry and he doesn’t want to see them anyway. The black spot is briefly there again; again it disappears. There is thunder outside, the flashes of light are gentle, almost like the headlights he’s been used to every night as the traffic slows to a trickle, but every couple of minutes someone stays the course past his house.
The soft, glowing light struggling against the blinds, makes the red numbers completely invisible, and only the clock remains. Everything seems a different color, desaturated. His bed feels like an island.
There is something else he could almost sense it. An image. Scarcely present between these strobes of memory, like a single frame spliced between each moment of consciousness. Now, with his eyes fully open, he sits there and attempts to piece together the thread. He begins to feel the dryness in his mouth and feel the discomfort of his full bladder. It never fails when he’s had too much coffee the day before. So he lets it go, the tying of strings to find memory. A near impossibility, when they’re single frames interspersed within a night of dreaming.
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