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6/14/2025, 3:20:22 AM
February 4 -Contemplation-
Darkness surrounds you, still and impenetrable. You blink your eyes, and it seems less dramatic. There's a sliver of red light shining from the alarm clock at your bedside table. You can feel your body, and hear the distant sounds of machinery and automotives that make up the background hum of the city. It's bitterly cold, you realize, and you can feel a headache coming on, but even that seems preferable to the horrific bodilessness of that (transfer) bizarre dream. As you sit up and look around, you take in...
an ordinary bedroom. Your bedroom. Desk, closet, dresser, bookshelf stacked with study materials. Where did that moment of strangeness, as if the place is unfamiliar, come from? The more you try to think about it the worse the pounding in your head becomes. Is there something wrong with you?
You roll out of bed, get to your feet in a discombobulated stagger, and feeling strangely out of place in your own body, stumble to the bathroom. In the fluorescents, the face that greets you from the mirror looks horrendous. Beads of cold sweat stand out on your forehead, your eyes bloodshot and staring. Unmistakably, though, it is your face. Black hair. Black eyes. Fine, scholarly features. Clear skin, tending toward the fair. It's the face that, with some changes as you've grown, you've been looking at in the mirror every day for eighteen years. It looks as if it doesn't belong.
You've never had any complaints about your looks before, but now somehow this face looks pathetically shoddy and slapdash. The face you should have is quite different, isn't it? The face you were wearing just moments before, when the world melted, that face wasn't like this at all. You reach up, grab your own cheek, and feel the pinch. See skin compress between your fingers. This is at least no dream.
That hand in the mirror is the next thing to catch your attention. Just like the rest of you, your left hand looks wrong. It itches terribly. Without a thought you find yourself scratching the back of your hand with a vicious force, sinking your nails into it so hard you almost draw blood as you scrape cruel red welts across the skin. The pain is a momentary distraction, but it does nothing for the itching, which you now find spreading across your entire body. On the skin, under your skin, into your bones, racing through your nerves and down your blood vessels. Everything is wrong. The air in this bathroom is as heavy as water around a submarine, suffocating you with pressure.
Darkness surrounds you, still and impenetrable. You blink your eyes, and it seems less dramatic. There's a sliver of red light shining from the alarm clock at your bedside table. You can feel your body, and hear the distant sounds of machinery and automotives that make up the background hum of the city. It's bitterly cold, you realize, and you can feel a headache coming on, but even that seems preferable to the horrific bodilessness of that (transfer) bizarre dream. As you sit up and look around, you take in...
an ordinary bedroom. Your bedroom. Desk, closet, dresser, bookshelf stacked with study materials. Where did that moment of strangeness, as if the place is unfamiliar, come from? The more you try to think about it the worse the pounding in your head becomes. Is there something wrong with you?
You roll out of bed, get to your feet in a discombobulated stagger, and feeling strangely out of place in your own body, stumble to the bathroom. In the fluorescents, the face that greets you from the mirror looks horrendous. Beads of cold sweat stand out on your forehead, your eyes bloodshot and staring. Unmistakably, though, it is your face. Black hair. Black eyes. Fine, scholarly features. Clear skin, tending toward the fair. It's the face that, with some changes as you've grown, you've been looking at in the mirror every day for eighteen years. It looks as if it doesn't belong.
You've never had any complaints about your looks before, but now somehow this face looks pathetically shoddy and slapdash. The face you should have is quite different, isn't it? The face you were wearing just moments before, when the world melted, that face wasn't like this at all. You reach up, grab your own cheek, and feel the pinch. See skin compress between your fingers. This is at least no dream.
That hand in the mirror is the next thing to catch your attention. Just like the rest of you, your left hand looks wrong. It itches terribly. Without a thought you find yourself scratching the back of your hand with a vicious force, sinking your nails into it so hard you almost draw blood as you scrape cruel red welts across the skin. The pain is a momentary distraction, but it does nothing for the itching, which you now find spreading across your entire body. On the skin, under your skin, into your bones, racing through your nerves and down your blood vessels. Everything is wrong. The air in this bathroom is as heavy as water around a submarine, suffocating you with pressure.
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