free writes this week

 In this room there are untold truths. Stopped behind teeth with barely even a movement of the tongue. As if the world wasn’t so incredibly vast, with the universe beyond it too. Beyond this house was a bigger one. A real one, made for people instead of the strange small creatures that scurried about. The larger house was barren. Concrete. Cold. A single mattress in the corner, slightly uninflated. But the windows were nice and big, and it made the smaller house gleam in the evening light. Beyond the house there was rubble: broken bricks from parts of history long forgotten, shards of glass, the occasional personal item coated with dust. But beyond that there were trees. A vast forest that had come to take back it’s land now that there were few people left to punish it into submission. It’s hard to know what’s past the forest. It’s been too long since anyone’s had the resources or mental stamina to go much further than where they are, but they still speculate. 

The tree outside the window looked like a fern. It made him feel tiny. Cabin fever was real it turned out and he was sweltering. Maybe he just had a regular fever too. In moments of despair built by the absoluteness of time he could feel his spirit stretching out. And perhaps it was the lack of food, unquelled fever, or general existential distress, but he believed he saw himself walking out. Going towards the tree, touching it. The tree shrinking, and himself growing, matching their size in the middle. “I’m like the trees” he thought. Ever so passive. So very absent of humanity. Or maybe the trees were more human than he was. He thought this over and then disposed of the thought; not with any intentionality, but with the dismissiveness of a child that ran out of energy at a birthday party and laid flat on the floor to the dismay of their parents. He then closed his eyes, though this didn’t stop the shifting. Now it was the colors behind his eyelids. Flippant blues and sparkling reds with the occasional dazzle of true gold. Not like fireworks: it was more dimensional than that. It was dizzying. Hypnotizing. It furthered his forgetfulness for this time and place. Perhaps he was not here at all. All he could see were the little lights in the infinite dark expanse, so he believed that that was all there was. It was life under a magnifying glass. But a magnifying glass at a distance, so it just made everything smaller. In that moment, he could have swallowed life like a pill, but it might have killed him to try. The sleep was heavenly. Absent of the rules that make reality itchy. And when he awoke there was only the tree.