Stay Awake

 I look back on my time in the room as the sliver of moonlight left of myself

A comet leaving trails of movement in particulate matter, the darkness still very much awake.

The message was the sky this morning, a kindness in the sun.

I'd looked through eyes finitely deeply until my dreams met the day.

This morning, I'd had to escape a wooden recluse. (I'd return to the smell of turpentine).

The strange scents of Exeter had returned and I was able to read the machine, free of my body's riposte. There was real oxygen filling the hollow chambers of the scaled models. The smell of current through metal, this time, contained and beautiful in implication. The perfume of passers by. The world was working. The sky led me through. I followed the road back today with the sun in my eyes.

There was danger on the way. Not enough information to commit to a decision. The flight out of here looked at the road through glass eyes. Without so much attention to detail, it needed less energy than the environment would require to traverse it. I remembered the nucleic glow and measured it through the windscreen. It seemed to be getting further, I doubted my own instruction and elected to walk through the grid. Summer was still there. My waking body's unsettling dream doubted until my body would react to decide. Windows were full of rooms. 

Around the occluded edges there were ripples in time. Roads were deeper. The edge folded in on itself. In the darkness, people moved. They were not bound by the rules of physiological traversal. Instead, they spun with my mind around dark corners and into my eyes, meeting me as an interception. An interruption. They pulled me into a body's horizon. The sun, the stars, the clouds would disappear in broad daylight. We watched the ripple as scale invariant waves. Everything was channelled through an invisible conscious heat from my rooted location, heliocentric.

a diary entry.

I am trapped in a strange machine. 

As an observer, anywhere outside of where I look is subject to increasingly strange law.

As the observed, I can no longer assume I am. 

The space around me, a force or field I at once generate and change in conjunction with my presence. 

Any hard rule which would hold where I am looking is subject to be broken outside my gaze.

Each day the rule begins to break, my key is lost before I leave my residence. I spend a small amount of time looking for it, remembering that my mind would have been shrouded in doubt. I would have assumed it was a loved one, an embodied agent of intelligence nearby.

Now, I am sure it is the machine. I am locked in a gate. It is only  temporal.

In this time, my body feels the churn of possibility. A discomfort. A belief in my state of awareness.

The relative state of awareness of my body. Knowing any divergence from local engagement would have led to this gate. Knowing a force would inhabit the space where it was and I was not. Knowing the strict principles of logic in uncertainty would lead to these possibilities.

The gate is not assigned an identifier. The physical properties of the gate are the strict possibilities bearing down on my soul. 

There are people in this place. They do not abide by the same rule. They traverse the space which is possible to traverse instead.

For everything I tolerate, I am barely tolerated. Everybody responds to me as if they know something.

Since my existence has been deemed impossible, therefore my absence predictably present, when I arrive in spaces, they have often morphed.

There are signs of growth rates declining outside of the dominant market forces. 

Cars often try to park where I am walking. Large proportions of people make the same decisions at the same time - to walk in pairs, to hold hands. On a single day, it was decided that hats were to be worn. Subtle but telling changes to the stock in shops. Portable phone chargers have been phased out in favour of car chargers. Cruelty free goods are harder to find.

Independence has again been overruled. The world bends to a darkness in decision.