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There is a cup of coffee in your hands you don't remember making.
It must be hot, because you can see the steam rising from it, but the heat itself doesn't seem to register in your palms. Something tells you it should be burning your fingers, but all you can sense is static.
Early morning light filters through the blinds like a retro movie filter, and the world is just that, moving pictures through heavy golden blurs. It seems surreal, how brightness bleeds from the window, making flocks of dust dance against each ray, and casts warm shadows over the room.
The house was silent and still, serene, countertops clean, dishes put away, that worn, red and white stripped tablecloth you'd picked with him years ago placed neatly over the table beneath your arms.
Maybe, you reason with yourself, maybe it's because you can't wrap your head around how bright it all is. Too used to shutting yourself into cramped rooms, to switching day and night and sleeping through entire mornings. Maybe it's your fault. And maybe it'll pass.
You look at your hands. They are yours, or they should be. Your eyes trace the line of each scar that crisscrosses the knuckles, palms and fingers. You remember having scars just like those on your own hands, but these didn't feel like they belonged to you. It was within the reaches of uncanny valley, a disturbing, near perfect mirror of reality, but so viscerally misplaced it made your stomach turn.
You hear the static crackling, a whiff of sound reaching into it, and the eyes you see through blink slowly, chin tipping up towards the noise and finding him across the room. He's leaning on the doorstep in his pyjamas, bed hair mussed up. You watch him in layers. He's there, but he isn't. No, he is. He is. You can't miss.
It takes you a moment to realize he's saying something. You see his lips moving, forming words, but he might as well be speaking another language altogether, because each letter seems to clash together too harshly to be comprehensible. It was all too strong, too loud for you. It's not his fault -it never is- but the world was wrong, everything was wrong, and you weren't you, and you couldn't understand him when you weren't there.
You frown slightly, trying to pick up on his inflection instead, hoping to at least identify a potential question. Sound echoed and bounced from his tongue to the walls and it meant nothing, it said nothing, it was just... Noise. You wish he had subtitles, but then again, you're not quite sure if you'd be able to process written words right now either.
He walks across the table and leans over to kiss your head. You couldn't feel his body warmth. The faintest pressure on the side of your body told you he had his hand on your shoulder.
His expressions were wrong, erased, distorted. He wasn't him when you weren't you. It didn't make sense. Obviously, you know he's himself -and that he's real, and here, and now- rationally, you know it all, but there was a certainty you couldn't shake, a feeling deep within you that insisted, echoed, molded your vision. You don't trust it, but you can't get past it.
You smile for him, raise your eyebrows in fabricated amusement. It seems to do. His eyes soften. You look down at your mug of coffee and methodically, robotically raise it to your lips.
It tastes like cotton.
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It must be hot, because you can see the steam rising from it, but the heat itself doesn't seem to register in your palms. Something tells you it should be burning your fingers, but all you can sense is static.
Early morning light filters through the blinds like a retro movie filter, and the world is just that, moving pictures through heavy golden blurs. It seems surreal, how brightness bleeds from the window, making flocks of dust dance against each ray, and casts warm shadows over the room.
The house was silent and still, serene, countertops clean, dishes put away, that worn, red and white stripped tablecloth you'd picked with him years ago placed neatly over the table beneath your arms.
Maybe, you reason with yourself, maybe it's because you can't wrap your head around how bright it all is. Too used to shutting yourself into cramped rooms, to switching day and night and sleeping through entire mornings. Maybe it's your fault. And maybe it'll pass.
You look at your hands. They are yours, or they should be. Your eyes trace the line of each scar that crisscrosses the knuckles, palms and fingers. You remember having scars just like those on your own hands, but these didn't feel like they belonged to you. It was within the reaches of uncanny valley, a disturbing, near perfect mirror of reality, but so viscerally misplaced it made your stomach turn.
You hear the static crackling, a whiff of sound reaching into it, and the eyes you see through blink slowly, chin tipping up towards the noise and finding him across the room. He's leaning on the doorstep in his pyjamas, bed hair mussed up. You watch him in layers. He's there, but he isn't. No, he is. He is. You can't miss.
It takes you a moment to realize he's saying something. You see his lips moving, forming words, but he might as well be speaking another language altogether, because each letter seems to clash together too harshly to be comprehensible. It was all too strong, too loud for you. It's not his fault -it never is- but the world was wrong, everything was wrong, and you weren't you, and you couldn't understand him when you weren't there.
You frown slightly, trying to pick up on his inflection instead, hoping to at least identify a potential question. Sound echoed and bounced from his tongue to the walls and it meant nothing, it said nothing, it was just... Noise. You wish he had subtitles, but then again, you're not quite sure if you'd be able to process written words right now either.
He walks across the table and leans over to kiss your head. You couldn't feel his body warmth. The faintest pressure on the side of your body told you he had his hand on your shoulder.
His expressions were wrong, erased, distorted. He wasn't him when you weren't you. It didn't make sense. Obviously, you know he's himself -and that he's real, and here, and now- rationally, you know it all, but there was a certainty you couldn't shake, a feeling deep within you that insisted, echoed, molded your vision. You don't trust it, but you can't get past it.
You smile for him, raise your eyebrows in fabricated amusement. It seems to do. His eyes soften. You look down at your mug of coffee and methodically, robotically raise it to your lips.
It tastes like cotton.
© All Rights Reserved
