Interlude:
February 4, 2019 -Indulgence-
When I woke up, everything was different. Nothing was different.
I was lying in bed. I had been lying in bed before. I was lying in bed now.
There was no light on, but in the dark I could make out the features of the room perfectly clearly. A high ceiling that was built a long time before I was born. Tatami mats with a welcoming, traditional odor. The futon that (I had slept on for 18 years) I had never slept on before. The tower of a computer on (my) his desk, standing like a vacant office building with all of its lights dead.
The moon was shining somewhere, but in this room there were no windows.
I could feel that clear, white light.
I craved it. Wanted to drink it like sweet milk.

The clothing on my body felt heavy and strange when I stood up, layers of silk that felt like I'd been wrapped up like some pampered character's expensive present. They were perfectly familiar. This was how I should dress, not in that trash (I) he'd walked around in. Why would I want to wear something that had come over the sea?

My feet made no sound as I crossed the black space of the room. The door was silent too, air swirling thickly around it as I slid it open. Without the moon or the smell of anything living, this house was down at the bottom of an abyss, a noiseless, lightless world that someone had put me in to keep me from living. It wouldn't do any longer. I drifted down the corridor and the wake I left in the sluggish air drifted with me, whispering to the dead wood of the mansion about the changes that were coming.

I walked down the hall in the world of silence.

I opened the doors to the rooms where the people slept in their own black little incensed boxes, decorated with the things they loved and choking without the moon.
I hated them. I pitied them. I resented them. I wanted nothing to do with them.

I wove my way further out, until the air grew fresher. Before me was the door opening on the garden.
I touched it.
I felt the chill of living air.
Sound spilled into the world of silence.

The sounds of the garden were faint, subtle; soft wind rattled the branches of leafless trees, water in the pond shifted against itself as koi moved through it, somewhere in the distance a thrush cried. None of the people in the house would wake from the sounds, but however subtle the something may be its difference from nothing is infinite. Out here was the life of the world, all the delectable aromas of that life carried on the air. I breathed of that life, basked in the moonlight, and lived.