Friday

I closed my eyes. I opened them. Rinse, and repeat. I’m not going anywhere. I think things. I open up to the well of words and moments that made up Thursday, and try to make sense of all of them, scrawl them out into one flowing line, watching it break apart again as it moves up and down. The thoughts grow more rampant and less controllable, until it enters that single freeform spin-cycle without space or punctuation or intention or design but merely the chaotic upheaval and manual defragmentation of damaged files which I have to watch and nod and say okay to as they rush by so fast I can’t see them and they smash into one another like blocks in a cargo bay and I’m standing and then I’m falling

One.

I re-enter the world with my head thumping, my lungs breathing heavily. I hear the noises of the house and the surrounding neighbourhood with an acuteness born out of misplacement. I have never slept here before. I am all alone in this tiny house with no alarm system in a part of town where I’m pretty sure all its slope-jawed, thick-browed inhabitants have the same great-grandfather. Every bump, every contracting beam, every electronic hum, animal bark, distant shout – they are magnified excruciatingly loud. I do my best to ignore them. I close my eyes. I open them. Rinse, and repeat.

The grammarless spiral into havoc word-form. This equates to that equates to the other. Calibrate the noises. Calibrate the silence. I am one of those chalkboards with their complex algorithms filling every corner staring at every inch and not understanding any of it except as that entity that runs through my head demanding to be seen and felt and taken apart and then I’m falling

Two.

How long will this continue?

The answer is Six. It’s always Six.

I fall Six times in the space of God-knows, and then it changes. I stop falling. I start shifting. I feel like every five minutes my body hoists itself up and rolls over, seeking some way to feel less and be less. Every now and then I reach the end of the bed and I almost fall for real, but I’m so on edge about the first six times I don’t let myself. It fills my mind completely, this rolling and falling. It goes on for hours and hours, and I’m aware of every damn second of it.

7:00 AM. You have arrived.

Thwack the alarm. I urinate. I pace through the house and look at it through unbelieving eyes. I’m so tired.

Paintings. Paintings of houses and the ocean. A painting of that same colonial shack on the beach that I see everywhere. A painting of those two dilapidated farm houses I see everywhere. A drain smell. Religious texts sitting up against Jeffery Archer.

I take out a bag of Otees. I open and close the same cupboards over and over looking for a bowl. The best I can find is a glass oven dish. Cereal. Milk. Crunch crunch. Eating these things is like eating fibreglass and sugar. By the time I’m done there are small sores all over my mouth. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Nietzsche.

I write this.

I defecate. There are mirrors everywhere. I shower. The geyser is turned off. I turn it on. The water pressure is so low only a lonely dribble splurts out over my head. Standing here with twelve or so reflections watching me, I feel like I’m bathing in a public fountain somewhere, while tourists are laughing and taking pictures. The water stains on the glass cage of the shower are a landscape of coniferous mushroom stalks. I wonder where exactly I am.

I look at my reflection. The dark marks under my eyes are streaks of warpaint; a revenant of my nightly battle. I walk away.

Clothes. Black pants and a long sleeve navy blue shirt.

I meditate. I sit in a comfortable chair with my feet up and my arms resting beside me, and I stare at the ceiling, some point above eye level.

Let this become your world. Everything else isn’t as important right now. It’s just you and the pale whitewash of the ceiling. The temperature is neither hot not nor cold. Not a single muscle in your body is tensed. There is nothing but you and the whitewash and your heavy, heavy eyelids.

My eyelids flutter, and close.

That’s good, now just remember it’s you and the whitewash and nothing else. Picture it in front of you. You are floating towards it. Just you and the whitewash. It’s three metres away. It’s two metres away. It’s one metre away. You collide with it and fall through it into a deeper, quieter place. Everything is blank and pearly. It’s okay, you can relax now.

The voice keeps talking after I surrender control to it, murmuring about whitewash and loose muscles and how calm and relaxing everything is. This is a deeper kind of consciousness, where my body is less... present.

Yet despite this, I’m still falling.

Twice I feel myself clutching desperately at the armrest, and the action disrupts the whole flavour of the trance. Nothing is different anymore. Self-hypnosis used to work. It used to let me sleep. It used to rejuvenate me.

Now, I return to the world feeling wearied, cheated, and only marginally more focused.

I need to find a way to make this better. Less drifting. Less babbling overdraught of words. More calm, hospitable Void.

Zoom Time. I’m running late (which means I’m running exactly on time) so I make use of every chance to overtake cars and hit the change between red and green lights in second gear. I arrive two minutes early. Fetch a midget, drive slower. I turn on the air conditioning because I don’t need it but other people do. Drop a midget. Air-con goes off, windows open to dispel the oven-baked air.

I stop by at home. I make transcripts of everything on Facebook. I, librarian. One day I’ll want to read this again. There are very few things that should be forgotten absolutely.

Mass Effect. My sniping skills are returning to me. I save a colony from an organ-harvesting hivemind. I break a convict out of a maximum security prison. I do this in stylish black commando armour with blue stripes. Customisation is important. I have written a whole background for Commander Nova Shepard; service & school records, medals, opinions on aliens and their culture. If you devote hours of your life to something, you don’t do it in half-measure. Anything less than devotion is a waste of time.

I drive back to xxxxxx. I feed the dogs. I check to make sure there’s nothing on television tonight.

I take a moment to read. It’s just me sitting here, reading Vox aloud. Honing my voice. Practising talking, because I don’t do it enough and it really is something you lose if you don’t keep your senses sharp. I get tangled in numerous Freudian slips and hit vocal bumps frequently. It’s like exercising your muscles in zero gravity. The process feels oddly detached from worldly necessity, but you know you have to do it because when you furlough anywhere groundside – when you exit decontamination and enter a conversation – you need those muscles to work as best they can.

I write this. My throat is sore. I drink some water. Rinse, and repeat.

Reading ancient transcripts. This is amazing – did I really think like this, or was it my standard syntax-to-result style? If not, then so much has leaked out of me it’s difficult to comprehend. I guess it all started to weigh down on me after a while. The situations I had to live through, the insomnia, the biting whispers... where did my sunny optimism go?

Burnt away. Burnt away by too much caring.

$#!7 got real.

I got surreal in return.

I read an old favourite, The Masque of the Red Death, by Poe. I think I was slightly delirious when I read it the first time, because the zany images were much more forthcoming. I still enjoy it. Its meaning is just as indiscernible.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The perfect blend of prettiness and yuck.

I check the internet. Nothing. Slightly relieved. I need a while to replenish myself.

Frozen stuff defrosted, lukewarm sludge eaten. If I never eat another chicken breast it’ll be too soon.

I’m reading Hexaemeron, but I have this overwhelming urge to sleep. I lie down. I tell myself that things have to be different. I need to break the cycle.

I slow down every thought. I punctuate with painful slowness. But at some point, these definable quantities escape me and the spinning, dancing stream of words is hurling just as chaotically through my tormented mind. I sit up and see something amazing; a web formed from right angles, made of shadow-stuff and the orange-brown gleam behind a pane of glass. It all fits together so perfectly, I just sit and watch for a while.

I fall back down. Screaming variables and numeric foreplay. I sit back up. That amazing light play.

Rinse, and repeat. I lose count of how many times this happens. It makes me give up. I am awake and it is midnight, and I will not go back to sleep.

The interplay of amber cobwebs are everywhere now, as I sit alone in the darkness.