NEEDLING

My eyes were open. I was walking up a staircase. Very tired. Disgruntled. Wanting only one thing in the world: to take a shower and renew myself. Up the stairs, I knew, there was a public shower I could use. But for the life of me, I couldn’t make it up the stairs. There was a person sitting on the stairs leaning against the wall, having a smoke. This person was a woman mid way up the stairs. Sitting and smoking. I couldn’t see much else, it was all so fuzzy. I was in some sort of a fog. There was no fog around me. There was no fog in the house I was in. There was no fog on the staircase going up. There was lots of fog in my head. My head was heavy. Very heavy. I was literally falling awake. A horrible sensation, whether falling asleep or falling awake. It’s unworldly, it should be done automatically without having to think about it. It’s as if some inexplicable forces are trying to pull you out of your body or out of your consciousness. It’s unpleasant. She said, “you’re doing just fine, you’re almost there.” She went back to her cigarette, not moving, just looking at me. And I crumbled on the last stair. I had made it all the way to the top when the fog became too heavy, and I could barely understand what the girl was saying. I held on to the wall and sat down, sliding my hand melodramatically down the grey wallpaper. I awoke.

(Snapshots. Snapshot after snapshot. Watched the movie by Chris Marker in class last night. La Jetée. Going in and out of consciousness, or time travel, whatever you want to call it. When I was a teenager, I used to read about ‘out-of-body’ experiences, trying to explain the sensations I felt almost nightly going to bed. It’s all about the moment it takes to fall asleep or to fall awake, what level of consciousness you might find yourself in at any one point in time or in space. Sometimes, things get messed up, and the boundaries between time and space get messed up, or they simply change to a time / space relation you’re not used to. Call it hallucination, out-of-body experience, time travel, abduction by aliens, hardcore dreams...it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s a trick of the mind, electrical surges slightly off beat.)