crack crack

Reality. Learning. Memory.

Each morning, she would wake up with an understanding that today is another day. That there was yesterday, and there will be tomorrow. That today is a present sandwiched by the past and the future, and that today she will apply her knowledge of her world from yesterday to theoretically be able to face her world tomorrow.

Knowledge and understanding. Feelings. Hope. Faith.

Today, however, something seems quite different. She forgets. She tries to remember why she keeps forgetting. She realises that she has been losing sleep. She wonders why she would, each morning, wake up with an understanding that today is another day. She starts to think that the order of time – the rise and the set of the sun and the cycle of death and of birth – does not make sense.

Déjà  vu.

What makes today different than yesterday? What will make tomorrow?

She takes naps in between her long states of wistful consciousness. Her naps are a millisecond in length and everytime she wakes up from those little naps, she gasps and tries to remember.

Have I lived?

How long have I lived?

Did I exist before I started living?

What happened before then?

She asked no question about the future as the future, she thought, was nothing more than a result of the past. But then she thought that she might be wrong.

Déjà vu.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

In order to forget and stop accumulating knowledge, one simply has to stop to sleep. No sleeping pills, no soap, just simply has to stop to sleep.

Somnolence.

If events that happen in reality got organised within the realm of our memory during sleep, are insomniacs doomed for stupidity? If we got rid of blinks between sights and if we got rid of sleep between wakefulness, would our minds still be capable of forming a coherency of reality? Is it possible to experience this world and gather knowledge from it without any break at all?

She tried to answer her questions but surprisingly found no ground to even start doing it. She got more anxious as she started to lose faith in reality. Anxiety, in turn, prevents her from sleeping.

What is dream after all? If it is simply the reverse of reality, how do we know which is which?

Déjà vu.

What are the rest of the world doing when I blink? There is a good reason that our earth is round: so that there are different timezones, and so people will never ever sleep together all at the same time. Along the twenty-four hours cycle of a day, at least one person will stay awake to watch it: keeping watch of reality, so it does not run away. What happens if the whole world would blink in sync? Would reality then fail to exist?

But has that ever happened?

In which side of reality?

Blink. Limbo. Blink.

Sleep, she thought. I need sleep.

Today, she turns thirty-six. All those years of doubting.

Just before our wake, we moved slowly towards the window, bodies locked. The sky was red, the ground white and pinetrees black, their tops covered in snow. It was way past midnight, but the whiteness of the ground reflected back in the skies and while the sun hid under the long horizon its rays escaped upwards. I cannot remember whether it was full moon, but it must have been that cloudy for the sky to be so impartial.

The window placed us right in between of the walls that turn into a slanted pair of attic ceilings. He has often told me that that peak, where two sides of the attic’s ceilings meet, is where energy is created – sitting right under it is just like being in the rain: it will pour all over you. I believed him. I doubt, however, that the wind whistled beautifully through the pinetrees, as I know that my mind was clouded as impartially as the sky was. The past hours have left me with my prolactin levels raised.

As I surfaced I knew it was there that I wanted to stay forever. More than a place, it was a constellation of him, myself, the sky, the breeze, my feelings, reddishness, imaginary rain, the snow, his skin, mine, all that I have described to you earlier, and time. A few months earlier, I told him that falling in love is a decision. I never continued my sentence; I simply never thought of why. I guess he wondered, but never asked – he saw me as his poetic muse; a mystery that should never be solved.

If only I could tell him: falling in love is always easy, has always been easy, and will always be easy. It happens all the time. It is unexpected, and once it hits, your world will turn upside down or any other direction you can imagine but never will realise. It is uncontrollable, yet it is a decision – of who to fall to it with. And it never had to be a conscious decision. I simply have not grasped that whole picture to let him know then.

I just wanted to stay there forever. I was with him, but it was not him. What happened was that inside my addicted self, dopamine gracefully gave way to my precious prolactin and soothed my cravings. Although love is a decision, it did not really matter who it was. Telling that truth would only break his heart. So I listened to the subtle whistle through the pine leaves, let it sing me a lullaby, and gave in.

I then promised myself to remember that moment. Beauty might not be true – and what is truth anyway – ; at least it cuddles you with a dream. Speechless of unthoughts, I reached again for his skin, looked through his eyes with sheer subservience, declared myself his once more and let him say it all through his lips feeling all the spaces where a part of me meets yet another, long, long before we two float away. He was my one and only, and I was his. Such crap.