Every Day is Exactly the Same
Every day is exactly the same because there is no day here. There's also no night. There's no early evening, no warm pink sun filtering in through the filthy windows. No sunrise. No sunset. Just never-changing bleak, watery light.
Sometimes she wishes it would be dark, because it would be a change. But there is enough dark inside without asking for darkness from whatever passes for the weather out there. If there is an out there. She supposes there must be, must be an Ashfield and a subway and a dark forest and a round prison covered in haunted eyes.
These things must be there. But she has no way to visualize them, remembers them only in pixelated form and the constant warm solidity of Henry at her elbow.
Oh, she knows this room. She's seen it in her nightmares and heard it from the lips of her sleeping husband. Every inch of it she knows, every cracked and yellowing molecule. There is no air here the way there is no air in space. Breathing is like breathing in exhaustion and malevolence and ennui.
Some times she makes lists of what she will do when she gets home. There are long hot showers and real tea and cigarettes on her porch and all the other things she imagines appear on the list of everyone who's ever been away from home.
But mostly there are people, Henry's brow furrowed over those storm at sea eyes, John's skinny shoulders twisting under her hands, the scrape of HB's voice, all hot red stone and scraping drawl. Troy said John was losing her voice, and she understands how that happens now. It isn't a voice or a face she's losing, it's the feel of things.
Sometimes she thinks she knows just how it will be. If she ever gets out into the world again. But there are times--moments? hours?--when the world simply fades for a while and even the apartment walls are like paper.
She dreams of scrawling words in blood on the walls and wakes with raw palms, fingernails torn and jagged. Her eyes close and when they open it's on unbroken skin, as though none of this
Rewind.
Reset.
She throws pencils at the ceiling, sometimes amusing herself by trying to form pictures, even though her hands shake and her aim is terrible. Her chin tilts toward them, thinking if she accidentally took out an eye that would be something.
Julianna comes to visit. She is pretty and soft and boring, the perfect socialite wife. Sometimes she flickers on and off, a tube about to blow. Sometimes there is something wrong wrong wrong
Rewind.
Rewind.
Start over.
The walls crawl with insects and rats and scrabbling, slimy things she can't look at. She wakes up in the small bedroom and the light is the same
She wakes up on the couch
Reset
She wakes on the kitchen floor with no idea how she got there
She doesn't want to wake up anymore.