real eyes
I am in bed, reading back years of a blog on my phone in the dark. My can’t sleep to won’t sleep. I had hoped to be more assertive this year, after all. My company are the words, the parasocial pantheon, and the gentle sounds of my girlfriend and cat, who sleeping behind me, do not stir.
I am lying on my side, one eye connected to the world, and the other to the pillow. Is it always this way?
It is this way through the dead angle time. No tick or chime. The only quiet time. I lie here cradled by dark in the cavern, unseen and unneeded. I become dark, and dark becomes me. I am nothing to makeup. No subject to objectify. So cool and deep that the pressure stops; I am no longer getting colder. I am no longer me. A cradle, a cavern, a sea. Obviate already.
Here, even the usually constant and deranged din of traffic from the ring road quiets. It is tempered now to an occasional rush of the road racer, shift worker - all too making use of this rareified obtiquity. I am them, they are me. And I wonder where it is we are going.
Eventually, I move out from behind the pillow and screen. At once I am confronted by a short strip of orange-red light, projected onto chasm's edge. Not so blinds after all, are we? One eye I can see it, one eye I cannot. This is a room, implies the edge. I have two eyes. A line. A mirror held up to me, reflects 'I can see.' One eye adjusted and the other untrusted. A boundary.
The eyes realise in this moment, that we all are the maw that the light shines into. We were the very plane of night, transformed now by the first hint of morning, into a scene of evil creatures lurking.
And the light sits waiting on the cusp of the void. It gazes in and ponders some dimseen horrors plural. With cross staff, sky, and calipers in hand - behold the great cartographer general, and all it will take by its terrible temperature! Tremble to know we are its call to adventure.
Pitiful now, the voidkin cower, for they know and do not know. They see and do not see. The two eyes, the hands of the clock, the world and the pillow. A cradle, a cavern, a sea. Moments distinct. And oh, the inexorable march of the light they call morning, and the unknowable form when the wave collapse me.
It is 05:05, and the ring road traffic rises to a terrific roar. I wonder where it is I am going.
other things said
- the angles after simulating peripheral neuropathy or a failure of the heart cor femme fatale just pronounce it wrong fatal
- an experiment with something more long-form. inhibited perhaps by the implied sleep diminishment, which does not make for easy grammar. i think this kind of piece probably needs more than a day to do well.