A Hotel Room in Austria - 01.03.06
There are times when you sit up, meeting your surroundings with utter confusion. When your mind reaches into peak levels of chaos, convinced the center cannot hold. This momentary disorientation can be caused by any number of things. Travelling... Sleeping over at another's house... a new apartment. It's all happened to me before. The half-asleep shock that generally, most of the time, dispells once you realize where you are. I am travelling. I'm all the way across the bloody oceans and rivers I can't even pronounce in a country I've never even seen before. Yes, this must explain the reason I feel like I'm having a heart attack at this very moment. Ferryman couldn't be so cruel again. Not now.
There's a shuttered light trying to creep in from the snowed slopes outside the window of this room, illuminating nothing at all that is even vaguely familiar to me. Not at first. Not the bed in front of me, not the desk at my side, not the chair I seem to have woken up in. A tray of food is sitting next to me, long cold. I'm now aware I'm trying to push back why I can't place why a cold plate of food would be there. So there's only one explanation.
This is all impossible...
Except there aren't traditionally smells in my dreams.
Fuck.
I can smell this room. I can taste stale fear in my mouth. That oh-god, shit-hit-the-fan taste we all, at some point or another, have known. There's a trace of a scent I can't quite place. I don't use it...
It's gotta be a dream. Nothing else makes any sense to me. I give myself a small shock from friction, but it doesn't do me a damn bit of good and it feels to real for my comfort. It doesn't help in the least. I still don't feel like I'm where I should be. Somewhere that isn't here.
It's a slow look from the chilled plate of food to the reflection in the mirror across from the bed. Why the fuck do they even put mirrors there? Voyeurs... all of them... I can't look away. My heartbeat goes still and I can feel the river closing around me, thick in my ears with pressure. The room is suddenly filled with the fridgid scent of the snow outside, boxed ozone, something wet and my lungs refuse to take it in.
So, we do a test of reality, which for a person who can bend it is a damn ridiculous test to ever try and pull off for confirming anything. I lift my arm. Deliberate, and the reflection follows suit. I let it fall to my side. This isn't what I want to accept, to see. I want to turn from this mirror more than anything in the world I've wanted, save a handful of grains in the back of my mind. But I can't. It's like looking at an accident. The morbid fascination, the god-strike. Sometimes I feel beyond the impossible, infected by my own growing hubris. This is one of those moments. Except it's what I see in the mirror that can't be true.
When did I get this face? It's like no one I have ever seen in my life. I was younger once. He looked at me with different eyes then. That time when I wasn't so cold and out of touch. A spaceman beyond anyone's grasp. When did I become so bitter, and will I always be? Are there any moments we can change and would we ever want to? Or is everything meant to be... I have to be dreaming, but I know in my heart I'm not. Not anymore. The poolside is long demolished. The house in that city no longer existent. The park no longer maintained. That little girl and that little boy long fled. Who fled first doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe someday he'll skip right out of my life. What does it matter who goes first?
So, no. I don't panic. Though I'm sure panic is waiting for me just beyond the careful order of my reason, my thoughts as I finally lift my face back to stare at the stranger in the mirror. I don't panic. I can feel hysteria in my chest, a swelling shock that pushes against all my hard-won efforts. I don't panic, but once I assure myself that I am awake, again, and not dreaming, not Sleeping, I'm really going to have to fucking consider the possibility that if I'm not the one that's crazy, that the world around me is.
Be objective, Jinxie. Be objective. I have so very literally become this stranger. I am her. And there goes objectivity... it's just another capricious fancy that's bloody well dancing just out of my grasp. Easy to imagine in the mind, but to take hold of it, to place it firmly; impossible. Nightmares are real, so the Mastigos say. My reality must hold in my mind. I must accept it as the foundation of the world or else all is just proven to be a lie. Nothing to be taken at face value. Nothing to be trusted. If all this can happen to me, all this that has happened to me before, now, after... then anything can happen beyond, tomorrow, what-have-you. Fate, god, whatever rules the world, oversees all, the running of eternity. It is not merely unpredictable, but malevolent.
But I knew this. I... accept..ed. Before.
The center holds.
---------------------
Atticus' side... (filtered entry)
There's a shuttered light trying to creep in from the snowed slopes outside the window of this room, illuminating nothing at all that is even vaguely familiar to me. Not at first. Not the bed in front of me, not the desk at my side, not the chair I seem to have woken up in. A tray of food is sitting next to me, long cold. I'm now aware I'm trying to push back why I can't place why a cold plate of food would be there. So there's only one explanation.
This is all impossible...
Except there aren't traditionally smells in my dreams.
Fuck.
I can smell this room. I can taste stale fear in my mouth. That oh-god, shit-hit-the-fan taste we all, at some point or another, have known. There's a trace of a scent I can't quite place. I don't use it...
It's gotta be a dream. Nothing else makes any sense to me. I give myself a small shock from friction, but it doesn't do me a damn bit of good and it feels to real for my comfort. It doesn't help in the least. I still don't feel like I'm where I should be. Somewhere that isn't here.
It's a slow look from the chilled plate of food to the reflection in the mirror across from the bed. Why the fuck do they even put mirrors there? Voyeurs... all of them... I can't look away. My heartbeat goes still and I can feel the river closing around me, thick in my ears with pressure. The room is suddenly filled with the fridgid scent of the snow outside, boxed ozone, something wet and my lungs refuse to take it in.
So, we do a test of reality, which for a person who can bend it is a damn ridiculous test to ever try and pull off for confirming anything. I lift my arm. Deliberate, and the reflection follows suit. I let it fall to my side. This isn't what I want to accept, to see. I want to turn from this mirror more than anything in the world I've wanted, save a handful of grains in the back of my mind. But I can't. It's like looking at an accident. The morbid fascination, the god-strike. Sometimes I feel beyond the impossible, infected by my own growing hubris. This is one of those moments. Except it's what I see in the mirror that can't be true.
When did I get this face? It's like no one I have ever seen in my life. I was younger once. He looked at me with different eyes then. That time when I wasn't so cold and out of touch. A spaceman beyond anyone's grasp. When did I become so bitter, and will I always be? Are there any moments we can change and would we ever want to? Or is everything meant to be... I have to be dreaming, but I know in my heart I'm not. Not anymore. The poolside is long demolished. The house in that city no longer existent. The park no longer maintained. That little girl and that little boy long fled. Who fled first doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe someday he'll skip right out of my life. What does it matter who goes first?
So, no. I don't panic. Though I'm sure panic is waiting for me just beyond the careful order of my reason, my thoughts as I finally lift my face back to stare at the stranger in the mirror. I don't panic. I can feel hysteria in my chest, a swelling shock that pushes against all my hard-won efforts. I don't panic, but once I assure myself that I am awake, again, and not dreaming, not Sleeping, I'm really going to have to fucking consider the possibility that if I'm not the one that's crazy, that the world around me is.
Be objective, Jinxie. Be objective. I have so very literally become this stranger. I am her. And there goes objectivity... it's just another capricious fancy that's bloody well dancing just out of my grasp. Easy to imagine in the mind, but to take hold of it, to place it firmly; impossible. Nightmares are real, so the Mastigos say. My reality must hold in my mind. I must accept it as the foundation of the world or else all is just proven to be a lie. Nothing to be taken at face value. Nothing to be trusted. If all this can happen to me, all this that has happened to me before, now, after... then anything can happen beyond, tomorrow, what-have-you. Fate, god, whatever rules the world, oversees all, the running of eternity. It is not merely unpredictable, but malevolent.
But I knew this. I... accept..ed. Before.
The center holds.
---------------------
Atticus' side... (filtered entry)