Sometimes I like to sit vacantly on the eastern end of the bed. I look at my skin and the random grooves on it which I was never aware of, and my consciousness would gradually recede to reveal the naked mechanicality of my life, in which on a daily basis I internally repeat the process of asking some random questions, providing no answers, and then conjuring up an off-topic speech to make a non-related point. Usually before long the big screen will be turned on, people will begin to sing or talk very loudly until the screen is turned off again. This is not to say that the line of events being kicked off afterwards are identical. The color of the sky, the growth of the weed on the balcony, the mood, the professional goal I have in mind, the genre of the music in the background, and the return of the stock portfolio all change numerously, even kaleidoscopically. However, at times these changes feel like the character configuration screen of an old Japanese RPG, where there are a rotating roster of gender, race, hair color, nose size, and a pool of skill points waiting to be distributed across some traits.
Occasionally things that do not fit to the theme pop up. Some of them are once mundane images of me walking down the street with a cup of latte macchiato in hand, of me getting off a car near a restaurant in a distant city, or of me peeling grapefruits - as the timeline deepens these images invariably become more succinct. The others are not images, but rather traces of smell and pieces of sound that I cannot decipher. All of them pop up very abstractly. Like the quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field. They come into existence and then disappear the same way, without context, only that I am left feeling a bit hollowed in their aftermath. I drag myself back to what I eminently and immediately have in order to shrug off the hollowness - what’s in this room and the strand of life this room represents, and realize that whatever I seem to have are not ammunitions that would help me fend off anything, but rather the hollowness itself. Far removed from when the images, smells and sounds were real, I’m left sitting by myself, like a lone passenger on a one-way train leaving his favorite city. I try to soften my posture a little so that my ass and back are less sore, only to collapse in bed and to begin to feel a little afraid.
I remember as a kid I used to go through one nightmare repeatedly, the exact content of which I have never pinned down - in it there is a dark and infinite unwinding, and nothing from this entire universe can escape from it. I could never bear witnessing it unfold entirely so I would abruptly wake up. And upon seeing the many lights and shadows that surround me from everywhere in the room, I would think that the unwinding had followed me, piercing the boundary between dream and reality. A fearful kid I was, I could only cry and fret aimlessly. Luckily the soft soothing voice of my mom, who was then a lot younger and always by me, would calm me down. She would pat me on the shoulder and put me back to sleep, and everything would once again seem fine. Many years later in another moment as I lie on a different bed, the vague fear has started to creep back. Only then I had my mother’s soft voices. Now those voices are gone. Not only that, the myriad of things that have taken place since those voices are likewise gone. All of my grandparents have died; and my mother is becoming frailer, while I stronger. I went from playing basketball with friends from my local high school to working out of an office with international colleagues, from kissing the one girl in my life without any reservation to lying alone in bed with all of the internal restraints of a calculating adult. And it seems that the unwinding has still followed. No longer a kid I am, I cannot cry and fret tonight. Only somewhere inside me the hollowness grows.
A column of shadow is being cast on the wall by the moonlight. Its black, geometric shape is a monolith with an unknown purpose. And the room where I am is left without a sound.
