Room/Sleep

It is dark in there. Dark enough so that you know it is nighttime, but certainly not the insular blackness that would encourage you to fall and sink into natural sleep. It is a dull grey bedroom. Raindrops are pebbles hitting the window. Wait. Do not start waiting.

Yes, sometimes the room becomes smaller and maybe it depends on the light, but it could be anything. You couldn’t explain how exactly the room becomes smaller, you are just very aware, sometimes, of your own presence. The capacity of your own clumsy human form jars with the clean, architectural aesthetics. Perhaps it is simply more likely that you have grown larger. This is what happens.
Other times, your space grows and grows. You are tiny, you are so tiny and the room is acres and acres of empty.
This makes you desperate. You need someone, quickly, to help you fill the space. A sudden urge, desire for communication.
Do people still talk? Do they still walk and cycle and touch each other? At times like this, the rain is a comfort because it is a physical thing.
You climb into bed and draw invisible pictures with your hands in the bed sheets. Illustrate to the outside what it looks like inside you. There is no one there and it is an invisible drawing. How can you be desperate? When you make invisible pictures? When you are so tiny? When you hide so much?
Okay, you think, make it visual. If something can be seen then people can believe it and understand it. You draw your fingernails across your stomach, creating think red lines in your skin. Again. Again. As you retrace the same lines, the skin begins to bleed. Then arms. Thighs. Face. You are focused, gently biting your lower lip to concentrate. It is calming and for the first time, you feel sleepy. You begin to blend with the wall. Your being merges with the environment and the very fabric of the room. Your flesh becomes soft and malleable, adapting to the spatial surroundings.

This is what happens when you start waiting.

Your body the size of a shirt button, you climb into your pillowcase and find a comfortable dimple in the soft duck-down. Finally, you have reached the kind of dark that will welcome you in like warm water and fill your system with sleep. As you drift into an echo of a dream, there is a quiet knock at your door. You remember why you were waiting, although you know you are not waiting anymore.