It’s not even midnight and things are already getting fucked up.
Objects have suddenly acquired a sinister personality. The dark corners of the room are becoming telescopes for transcendental beings. Patterns in the floorboards are beginning to stretch out of the confines of three dimensions. Light bulbs are sentient and telling jokes to each other. I am scratching mosquito bites that have begun to bleed. The shadows are beginning to chuckle. By three they will be cackling like drunkards.
Are these really insect bites or have I been scratching myself to death? There is some refuge in the clouds around the moon, but that sanctuary is beyond the reach of all but one of my many senses. Too many to count. Five is a demonic number anyway. Although in some cultures they call it holy. Numerology is a twisted pseudoscience. There is magic in all numbers, all shapes; magic of every kind. It all depends on the eye of the beholder, or the state of the mind the eye finds itself irrevocably bound to. It was only a jar of honey an hour ago, but the sight of that facet with the bent nozzle has curved this entire world, and now the jar is singing of its origins, its color, its rounded rectangular contours, its mystery.
It is not this place that turns against me, but my own mind. I know this, and it only makes the experience more disturbing. So much depends on a red snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor . . .
I call this four forty-eight syndrome. It visits me in my delirious insomnia. I do not beg and cry, I do not wave my arms in anguish and collapse into a heap of organic debris and wait to rot into soil that is free from the burden of thought. No, I walk through it with patience and a sense of childlike adventure. My home and my hell. A quiet domicile outside the boundaries of time, the wood between the worlds, where I wander and marvel. There is no escape: the where is my self, the when is now, the how is an illusion, the whence is memory and dream, the whither is the end.
But why escape? The why is why not. We will float here forever, and share our stories.