Time is losing its texture, flattening out until I can no longer keep my grasp on it. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, suspended in space and time like a star in a vast, uncaring sky.
Laboriously, as if moving through a viscous substance, I turn my head stiffly to my left. Someone has said something directed at me – I think. Regarding my numbly unresponsive face, my friend slowly repeats herself. Despite an arduous effort on my part, I can’t seem to catch the words; my eyes begin to glaze over lifelessly until her expression blurs into one that is pallid and moon-like. Somewhere in a deeply buried consciousness, I feel myself sink further away from the present into a milky nothingness where time is insignificant.
“Are you for real?”
Her voice penetrates the glassy palisade separating me from the world. It sounds faint, weak, and irrelevant. I feel as if I am helplessly spectating as I drown, a ghost in the making, haunting my own bones. Air transforms into a luxury I can no longer access, and the thick aroma of roasting coffee from the cafe – the cafe that I realise I have forgotten I am in – is suddenly suffocating. Dimly aware of my fingernails digging into my clammy palms, I try to blink, but my eyelids feel like lead weights.
As I stare unseeingly, my friend’s voice, stripped of its irritation and sharp with fear, continues to waver in and out of my awareness.
“Are you OK?” she asks in a hushed, anxious tone.
I can’t respond. A power beyond my control has taken over my body, clutching my tongue with an icy grip. With terrifying vulnerability, I am unable to do anything but try to anchor myself by defiantly clenching my fists against the merciless tide pulling me under. Sweat beads on my forehead, trickling down the contours of my face until it probes at the corner of my mouth and I taste the salty tang of my panic.
Losing all control, I am dragged further and deeper until I can feel time elapsing and blurring. I am swimming – no, falling – through a desolate emptiness that twists and turns beyond comprehension. Though I can vaguely see my surroundings and the figure in front of me, I feel like I’ve been hypnotised and paralysed at the same time. My perception of reality is like a held breath: it could escape me at any moment.
Abruptly, the world floods back into my consciousness. With heart-stopping clarity, my eyes snap open, and I am once again anchored in my skin. My eyes turn to my hands, where my ragged nails have involuntarily torn scarlet crescent moons into my yielding flesh. Standing out against my pale skin, the beads of red starkly remind me that I am present. Before me, the pale blur sharpens into hard planes of concern. Time resumes its rhythm.