the blue room and a stillness of indecision.

It went a bit like this:

.

Distantly familiar. Like a scent burned into your skin from an incoherent time and place, intractable, more real than any recurring dream of a dusty hallway and fingers of fire dancing across the wall.

Time lagged behind bites of the wind across the back of my neck as I twisted pieces of stringy hair across my fingers. I chewed on some thoughts and words, but let them fall to the back of my throat when everything slowed down and the characters started rotating and becoming fewer.

.

Something like a shock through the tips of my fingers as the figures blurred, save for one. And I scratched at the inside of my arm because it was cold, or because I needed it. I was left floating in the waves of an inexistent deep blue ocean, and the beams of sunlight beat through me with every glance. The waves threw me sideways and I had to hold myself up, without my bones.

.

I hid behind the other faces like a coward with cold fingers. I hid from the ghost in the corner of the dream I can't wake up from. The delusion that is a figure, feeding my fingers as they scratch at the page; drum a syncopated beat into the side of my forehead.

.

Then, like a moment from a scene I could orchestrate with a wave of my hands and the focus of my lens, it played out.

Somewhere, somehow, somebody yelled cut and it fell away.

It fell away as sand between my cold, but running fingers.

.

ally.