Awakened for two days without sleep is a space I had not visited for years. My aching back and its cracks were a visitor long gone and now it is returned. I reacquaint myself with the particles of night unfolding into the walls. Every time I shut my eyes, I drown in its infinite curtain or in the envelope of my own eyes; they are the same. Deep beneath these bowels, I let go of the shining desire to stay awake and fade into sleep altogether. Every time I slip, the fingers of my gut dart toward the clouds above my brow. The tips scrape the inside flesh with a deafening rhythm: do not fall asleep.
It is - as it was back then - devastatingly easy to lose my faith in the dark. I need not move, neither ligament nor lung, and I remain set still to be so dizzy. The door slides far down away from the foot of my bed and the walls follow. My eyes remain fixed on the imminent traces they leave behind, on the shadows they never left in the ever creases of my feet. I begin to needle between the airs and errors of each point and therein begins the sentence of my first faulty pilotage.
Every door is open. I am thrown up from my seat and stitched upstairs. What's that smell, that noise? It tastes like it is not. As an echo, as a heartbeat stretched via canvas, I see a beloved child in his cave of blankets. An atom away from a line of atoms that connects him to the most distant storm but he cannot hear the rumble. Space moves so slowly up here that his chest does not move at all.
If this room were filled with sand, one grain per eternity, and I had to hold my breath after each eternity, watching his stomach is as fast as mountains erupting, collapsing, and rising again. I can hear his snore hurling planets at me from years away, feel the void from the friction as he rubs his hair against the fibers of his pillow. I will be here until the room is full.
The memory of my last breath is dying. It was so long ago that it might as well not have happened. Even when I finally release, I will still be up here in the echoes. I burrow in the sky below while the ship below remains pilotless. With hope, upon my return, I will leave a whisperless seal as not to invite future intruders. I long for a perfect return but for now: I am the ceiling. I am the floor. I am the window. For many more uncertain futures, I will still be here carrying myself.
