► Sydney ▪ Micah ▪ Throse ◄
The problem with dreams is that you can never know whether what you see is future, or past. In this particular dream, he stood alone at the top of a slope. Surrounding him on all sides, wandering without aim through the emptiness, were shady figures. Some rose above him in height, while others were bulbous and squat. It was their nature to stumble along, blind and trapped inside their own heads. Their leathery skin stretched over cackling bones. Perhaps tufts of hair covered them in sporadic locations. Their eyelids were sewn closed with blood red thread. They could scarcely see a bigger perspective than from inside their own crude, tiny minds. Sydney was the only trace of color in this bleak, bleak world. They knew him, and were aware of him, but in their blindness his color could not be seen. To them, he was another conforming waste of space.
However, he could see. Sydney alone knew reality for what it was, and everything revolved around him. But even he could not see his own blindness. More naive minds might try to choose the enlightened path--to reveal their sight and their color to the world around them. They wished to help the world. Any intrusion like this would warrant the dark souls' undivided hate. A peculiar quality of the blind, here in this warped dream scape, is that they never wanted to see. And why would they? Even Sydney had to admit that they... they were happy here. They were happy with their conformity and their nonexistence. Why should one such as he risk his life and his light to share with unwilling, even hostile others? These dark shadows could not harm Sydney, so long as he left their blindness intact. Too bad for them; they would never see.
Sydney's blindness, however, he wanted desperately to shatter. It never occurred to him, not even now, that in order to see, he would need to first look. But how to do that? The answers eluded him as the fox eluded the hounds. His was not the only light in the world. There were others who shined, far away. This was not the light, as this fantastic world of nothingness, this void, proved. They were mere specs of distant stars, as was he. Nine shimmering hints of brilliance surrounded him, and the shades vanished. He had left them. They no longer needed to share this dark world with the unseeing.
Beep. Beep. Beep. The faint echo of an alarm filled the dark room. Morning sunlight found no purchase as it collided with, first, a closed set of black blinds and, after, the dark curtains behind them. Under the window one bed rested, unused for the night. Against the far wall was a second bed; this one contained a motionless body buried underneath a precipitous mountain of pillows. One errant hand poked out of the rubble, twitching in response to the soft wake-up call. The young adult beneath the layers of plush feathers and white fabric stirred. When he pushed himself to his knees, for he always slept facedown, his comfortable burial tumbled to the floor beside the bed.
The person who stepped out of bed after regaining his awareness was clad only in knee-length briefs. He yawned, stretched; the usual wake-up routine. With a few sleepy lip licks, he searched the room for his dresser. The short, stout thing was shoved into one corner of the room or another, and after especially taxing nights, Sydney could swear that it changed corners. From there he drew out folded clothes and placed each article on the edge of his mattress. In complete privacy he stripped and donned today's attire. Since, of course, being walked in on (when he didn't want to be) was a complete impossibility.
As the mindless, automatic morning ritual of sleep-deprived dressing finished, Sydney then noticed the quality of Welton's bed. His mind was gradually returning from the disengaged thralls of deep sleep, so it took another four minutes for him to realize that Welton had never returned. Sydney's sleeping habits bordered on the eccentric. He could fall into slumber moments after lying down, would not shift or make a sound during his sleep, and could wake up essentially on-command. However, the slightest disturbance would rouse him during the night--and he couldn't sleep with any amount of light present. He could sleep with any of the aforementioned factors--sound, light, movement--but doing so resulted in terrifying nightmares about the future. So instead, through gentle conditioning, Sydney had taught himself to be a very light sleeper.
"They're teasing this early," Sydney said to himself, eyes unfocused. "Spilled coffee, too."
He retreated from the hazy realm of foresight and stepped away from the pudgy dresser. After a minute of silence, he turned and left the dark room, steeling his eyes against the light that invaded through the open door. He turned down the hall and walked past the scarce decorations, reaching the bathroom just as somebody left. Inside, he wetted his face, brushed his teeth, and wore his contacts. He applied deodorant and observed his shape in the mirror. Today he'd chosen a simple button-up, as he usually did. Over that hung the loose uniform. Traveling up from there, his disinterested face stared back at him through half-closed eyes. Just two minutes until the yawns would stop and the sleepiness would retreat.
Thursday. The wretched day signified the worst: the height of the weeklong grind and you're not finished yet. The only thing worse than Thursday was Monday. It was the beginning of Thursday, as well. These thoughts marred Sydney's face as, after grabbing his hat, he descended from the dorm halls into the mess hall. As usual, with the lack of full awakeness in the morning, his power refused to be reigned in. A faint outline of every moving person in the room shifted just ahead of their real selves, causing all the activity to blend into one indistinct blur. This isn't helpful in the slightest, he thought in a groggy haze. In thirty seconds he would be wide awake, so at least there was that.
Until that solace came, however, Sydney was forced to navigate the food lines with care. As usual, he picked the precise time to arrive in order to avoid waiting in lines, and as he approached the table of his friends, the haze around his mind began to fade away. After he sat down, placed his tray in front of him, and noticed the pungent aroma of coffee drifting within the group, his brain finished its wake-up process and Sydney was good to go. The coffee came from Ha Neul, of course. He noticed her fumbling--aha. So the coffee spiller had been her. He might have figured as much. Seung Nim and Welton--oh, look, he wasn't missing any longer--sat across from each other. Everyone seemed to be staring at Helalyn, waiting for her response to something. He propped an arm on the table and settled in to wait for whatever that might be, too.
 Format layout by Nam.
 zfatal · Sun Aug 02, 2009 @ 06:49pm · 2 Comments |
