prelude for time feelers
It was 3:35am. I woke up parched, dreaming for a glass of cold water. It felt illicit to be awake, to sentiently inhabit these shared spaces. The neighborhood asleep was a nexus of hallway lights and puddles of water collecting under taps, in dark drains. It was a city of corridors, one like all things different in darkness. Regarding it I felt lost and also struck by a small amount of awe; very rarely did I partake in what was at once the exquisite pleasure and the maddening solitude of the insomniac.
This was the first time I'd been interrupted in my sleep in years. If it wasn't for my alarm I could sleep forever. A soundless, joyless, flavorless sleep. I never remembered my dreams. They said if you did recall them, it wasn't a very deep sleep. Mine were deep sleeps. Plush, fathoms-deep, you couldn't reach me there. I found that even the character of my room had changed. Things assumed a different quality, they were in an order I didn't recall arranging them. A lamp on a table, a book, dog-eared too early in.
Somewhere in the world it was 8:35pm, somewhere in the world it was 2 in the afternoon, somewhere it was 10:47 in the sunny morning and people were strolling down an indistinct promenade, as they tend to, maybe a man with a paper bag warm and seething with the oil from a croissant, or a woman was at the airport holding up a sign that said UNITED AIRLINES CAN NOW BE FOUND AT TERMINAL 3 with the most pained expression on her face as if it was the saddest news in the world or else that her wrist ached or that it was not the right time to be holding up a sign in front of a busy travellator---
Two days ago coming back from work I rushed out of the subway because I felt suddenly subsumed by airlessness, or else, that I forgot how to breathe- for the first time I felt, this is what it is like to get the wind knocked out of you, I almost scuttled out and on the way I felt my briefcase knock with a thud onto a body. I turned and it was a little boy, it was that little boy because he stood at the spot where I felt the contact and he had only just got up from the pavement, dusted himself off. But he didn't look very shocked, or wounded, instead he merely looked mildly disappointed, like I had just told him a joke and the punch line had fallen flat as a bad can of soft-drink.
Now I couldn't get back to sleep and I wondered if these two things coincided: feeling the air knocked out of your lungs, and this sudden sleeplessness, tiny blips in the agreeable uniformity of my patterned days. I wondered if it meant anything, if they were subtle signs, my body was warning me that something would atrophy, that I would soon need to set things straight; if somewhere inside me one vigilante cell was preparing for action, one cell to go awry, any thing and probably nothing could happen.
This was the first time I'd been interrupted in my sleep in years. If it wasn't for my alarm I could sleep forever. A soundless, joyless, flavorless sleep. I never remembered my dreams. They said if you did recall them, it wasn't a very deep sleep. Mine were deep sleeps. Plush, fathoms-deep, you couldn't reach me there. I found that even the character of my room had changed. Things assumed a different quality, they were in an order I didn't recall arranging them. A lamp on a table, a book, dog-eared too early in.
Somewhere in the world it was 8:35pm, somewhere in the world it was 2 in the afternoon, somewhere it was 10:47 in the sunny morning and people were strolling down an indistinct promenade, as they tend to, maybe a man with a paper bag warm and seething with the oil from a croissant, or a woman was at the airport holding up a sign that said UNITED AIRLINES CAN NOW BE FOUND AT TERMINAL 3 with the most pained expression on her face as if it was the saddest news in the world or else that her wrist ached or that it was not the right time to be holding up a sign in front of a busy travellator---
Two days ago coming back from work I rushed out of the subway because I felt suddenly subsumed by airlessness, or else, that I forgot how to breathe- for the first time I felt, this is what it is like to get the wind knocked out of you, I almost scuttled out and on the way I felt my briefcase knock with a thud onto a body. I turned and it was a little boy, it was that little boy because he stood at the spot where I felt the contact and he had only just got up from the pavement, dusted himself off. But he didn't look very shocked, or wounded, instead he merely looked mildly disappointed, like I had just told him a joke and the punch line had fallen flat as a bad can of soft-drink.
Now I couldn't get back to sleep and I wondered if these two things coincided: feeling the air knocked out of your lungs, and this sudden sleeplessness, tiny blips in the agreeable uniformity of my patterned days. I wondered if it meant anything, if they were subtle signs, my body was warning me that something would atrophy, that I would soon need to set things straight; if somewhere inside me one vigilante cell was preparing for action, one cell to go awry, any thing and probably nothing could happen.