Days 1 to 4 (part 1)

It's a crutch.

It's a bed.

Your tombstone already at its head.

You're just getting in some early practice.

Why stop there?

Why go anywhere?

The camera hums gently as it records you. Gently hums and records, hums and records, cheerful, like an ideal 1950's housewife.

Without the bed you think there'd be no support: it's all that's left of the world and it's shrinking.

Your forearms and legs hang over the sides and the reinforced edges of the mattress dig in, pressing sufficiently hard to let you know you'll have to move soon.

But for now it's the light behind your eyes that concerns you.

It really is uncanny, it really is so bright it burns your eyes, bleaches them, hardens them so that in daylight all you can do is stare.

Stare at the space in front of you. So near, so far, your perspective is fucked and so's your concentration.

So you stare. Maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of all that sleep you've lost. Maybe looking for something that your eyes can focus on.

But for now, your eyes are closed tight.

Fixed on the light that seems to be everywhere inside you, seems to be you. A desert dreamscape of white, a solar flare whose outrushing glare burned out your sight and left behind the memory of itself, and nothing more.

Even now it has the capacity to irritate you, unsettle you. Even without your eyes you cannot see darkness; and sleep. All you can do is sit there inside your head, looking, looking, searching for a change in the landscape, a blot, a bump, something to break up the regular monotony of the dreary white hall in which you sit. It's not a hall, you know that, but you think of it as such because were you not to, were it not what you make it, you would be lost in the expanse as your body disintegrated in an effort to fill the space and give the world some stability.

It is all you can do to hold on and you know this by the tension within that crushes your intestines and insistently tries to draw your gullet and lungs together.

And this is just one second, one millisecond, even.

Time never passes because there is no time.

There is nothing but that goddamned fucking whiteness that won't go away. It won't fucking go away.

And all the while the merry-go-round circles your brain: tra-la-la, tra-la-la. It circles and plays the same old fucking song. The same note.

Over and over and over and over and ... STOP!!

Even through the shout that you wish you could dream and scream and throw down on he ground like a giant firecracker, to break the monotony of the the white silence and that one damn note that's as bleak and dull and irritating as the silence that is it's twin. For the song makes no noise. The note has no sound. But it is there, nevertheless, clamant, repeating, circling...why? why? why? why? why? why? wh-

You shake your head, recognising that sleep will not visit you tonight.

So you roll over onto your back. And slip your arms under your head.And open your eyes...

to white.