7

My alarm does not wake me the following morning. For the first time in my adult life, I slept through it. The unusual circumstances of my awakening surprise me immediately. I cannot hear the noise, the room is perfectly quiet. I turn over and look at the clock. My heart stops. I should’ve been at work an hour ago.

I leap out of bed and throw on whatever clean clothes I can grab from the closet. I put on my last shoe and am ready to sprint out of my apartment, when, despite my rush, I am momentarily stopped. The project is ready, I think. After last evening’s catastrophe, leaving me feeling insecure about the genius I thought I had fortified over years of hard work, I need something to help me feel secure again. If I could present my invention to my company, gain recognition for the brilliant technological feat I accomplished, I would feel once again reassured. My neighbour’s pesky brilliance will mean nothing once I am immortalised in the halls of technological genius.

I take a second to go back to my bedroom and fetch the blueprints I made for the final iteration of the device. I have no time to eat breakfast, too preoccupied by the urgency of getting to work before the boiling water I must already be in gets too hot. Even the lift is too slow for me: I almost tumble down the stairs in order to get to my car as quickly as possible.

As I barge through the front door to the Emplecix building, I check the clock above the reception. I am an hour and thirty minutes late. I dart to the elevator. As the doors close, I shut my eyes for a moment. Through the adrenaline of the morning rush, I haven’t had the chance to think at all about how I found myself in those circumstances. Why did I wake up so late? Then, through the thin veil of a night’s sleep, I look back at the evening before. It all hits me within a second, the apathy flowing over me; but just before it takes over completely, there is a glimpse of pain that stings me right before being numbed. I am still somewhat panicked at my lateness, but it is as if my mind is transported back to yesterday evening. I feel like I am still lying in bed, looking at the ceiling. My eyes will not wander anywhere else.

By the time I open my eyes, I hear the elevator ding announcing the opening of the doors. I step out of the lift, making my way to my desk with quickened step. With my peripheral vision, I try to see if anyone is reacting strangely to my late appearance. They all appear to be busy with their work, but a part of me knows they noticed. I plant myself down at my desk, in a hasty motion, trying to appear as natural and undisturbed as possible. I take some sheets from the side of my desk and delve into them without hesitation. I reason that if I busy myself with work as quickly as possible, there might be the slightest chance that everyone will forget that I ever came in any later than usual.

A few minutes working away like this helps ease my nerves.

‘Hey Amon.’

I am startled, paralyzed by a familiar voice behind me. It is the voice of Donald, my project supervisor. My nerves instantly return and my blood runs cold. He knows I have come in late.

I slowly turn to greet him.

‘Hello,’ I say, attempting to keep up an air of indifference, perhaps even ignorance. There is a naive part of me that continues to believe that I can pretend I came in normally this morning.

I look at Donald’s aged brow, his wrinkled face. At first glance, to my surprise, it does not appear to carry any animosity. Instead, he appears very joyful, unlike I’ve ever seen him before.

‘You busy right now?’ he asks me.

Oh fuck, I think immediately. He’s going to ask me to his office so that he can fire me. My heart sinks in my chest. It is as bad as I worried.

‘No,’ I answer. ‘I’m not busy.’

‘Fantastic,’ he says happily, ‘there’s this entrepreneur presenting a new product in the meeting room. I was wondering if you could come over and sit in. It seems like something that would be right down your alley, and we could use your input.’ His eyes flashed with sudden excitement. ‘It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I think it could be really interesting.’

I feel a wave of relief wash over me as I hear that I am not going to be escorted out of the building. The relief turns to joy, and I gleefully agree to join the meeting, any meeting in the world, to forget my tardiness this morning.

‘Perfect,’ says Donald. ‘It’s starting in ten minutes, so you have some time to finish up whatever you’re doing. I’ll see you there.’

He walks away with a final nod and smile. His excitement at the meeting is pouring out of him in a contagious manner. Not only for having saved me from censure, I am suddenly happy about this meeting. It feels like it could indeed be interesting.

I put the final few stops on what I was working on, leaving it in a state that would be easy to continue from after the meeting. With five minutes still left till the meeting, I get up from my desk, beginning the walk to the meeting room.

Despite never having been to it before, I find the room without trouble. It is a space typically reserved for higher level meetings, ones with new potential investors or entrepreneurs like this one – ones that do not involve me. The novelty of the experience adds another layer of excitement to it. At this meeting, I would be sitting amidst higher-ups at Emplecix, those who decide whether projects get shot down or pushed through to completion. A valuable list of names whenever I choose to pitch my most recent invention.

The momentary reminder of the seeming success of my work, which then led to the events of last evening, quells some of the excitement I feel. The instant I start thinking about it, however, I stop myself. Stay positive, I tell myself. Focus on this meeting. Upon finding the meeting room and acknowledging that I am in the correct place, I hesitate no further. I open the door and step inside.

It is a long, grey carpeted room with blue walls. There are strip lights on the ceiling. A little ahead of the lights there is a projector. It is shining neutral light on a screen at the far end of the room, which has a lectern beside it. A table stretches the length of the room with office chairs all around it. 

Sitting at the table there are a few people. I only really recognise my boss from them. He notices me coming into the room and a smile spreads across his lips.

‘Everyone,’ he says, standing up and getting the attention of all others at the table, ‘this is Amon. He is our brightest engineer. He will be sitting in on this meeting. I’m hoping his expertise will come in handy with a product of this nature.’

Nervous at being placed in the centre of attention only a moment after entering the room, I approach the table. Men and women in suits stand up to greet me and shake my hand, which I do with a polite smile. Once everyone introduces themselves to me, we all sit down. There is an empty seat next to Donald at the end of the table farthest from the screen, which I presume is reserved for me. 

The moment I place myself down next to my boss, a horrible realisation hits me. I remember that through all my panic and rush from the morning, I did not have a chance to shower. I am wearing all the stress and sweat of the previous day, and if it were not for my fresh clothes and deodorant providing a thin layer of protection from my scent, I would be completely intolerable to sit beside. The gravity of being so ill-prepared at such a grave moment begins to weigh down on me, and the stress I felt coming up to the meeting is compounded by my sudden discomfort. As subtly as I can, I attempt to shift away from my boss, hoping to keep my foul aura to myself.

We wait for some time for the entrepreneur in question to arrive. Some of the executives around me have murmured conversations to pass the time. I sit patiently still, trying not to act in a way that is not appropriate for my station. At one point, out of boredom, I attempt to eavesdrop on the conversation of two women beside me. Just as I do, they immediately stop talking. Their conversation is cut short by the door to the meeting room opening.

‘I apologise for the delay, everyone,’ says the voice of the entrant. It is a male voice. After a millisecond of consideration, a shiver runs down my spine. I recognise whose it is.

Paralysed, I do not even bother to turn to see the man entering. My eyes remain fixed on the projector screen at the head of the table. In their anxious stasis, I watch as Jake, my neighbour, dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie, enters my peripheral vision. He hustles quickly to the top of the room, where he stops at the lectern. My eyes move over slightly to look at him. He is holding a brown briefcase in both hands. He gives everyone a quick, humorous glance.

‘But I’m sure what I’m about to show you will be worth the wait.’

Jake places the briefcase on the lectern and clicks it open. He removes a laptop from inside, followed by a small device that I cannot identify from my seat at the opposite end of the table. I watch him, transfixed, as he proceeds to manage the cables at the lectern, plugging them into his laptop as the computer turns on. Although I should be wondering about his presence there, I am not. My mind is so overwhelmed by everything I have gone through the past few days that it can no longer keep up with each new developing madness. It is instead completely blank. The closest I can get to a thought is noticing how unusual Jake looks in a suit.

‘Ok,’ says the entrepreneur, looking at the projector which is now showing the first slide of his presentation, ‘I think we can begin.’

The beginning of Jake’s slideshow is a blur. I know only that it resembles the typical corporate nonsense one might find in such a presentation. It does not even strike me as odd that Jake, someone who ought to be a musician, is so fluent in this role: his appearance, his demeanour, his whole identity appear to fit this character so well, that the man I met only a few days ago is the one who comes into question. I amuse myself with distant thoughts as incongruent words pour from my neighbour’s mouth and fill the room. It is amidst those thoughts that my understanding of the situation surfaces. I realise that Jake has come to my company to pitch the idea of the living cloth which I saw him perfect the day prior. The invention which had managed to defeat me in my personal quests would now come to smother me in my professional life too. I drift further away into empty thoughts. The image before me begins to degrade, my eyes start to blur. In that simulacrum of life, the world appears to be made as if of fabric.

It is only once Jake reaches the slide that first shows the product that my attention is once again pulled back into reality.

‘I call it the TackTile,’ he says. He moves his hand outwards, gesturing at the image on the projector screen.

The projection is divided into two parts. On the left side is an image of the device, and on the right are empty bullet points that will be procedurally filled as Jake continues through his explanation. The image of the device is quite bland, and from a first look at it, I cannot discern what it is supposed to be. It looks like a single, square grey tile, uniform and devoid of any kind of buttons or markings, displayed in this case floating on a white background. There looks to be a single black wire coming from the bottom of it, but it quickly vanishes off the screen. From such a simplistic design it is difficult to discern what the device’s function might be. At the very least, it is very far removed from the appearance of the living cloth. I feel somewhat comforted that my worst suspicions did not come to fruition. 

‘As you may know,’ begins Jake, ‘marketing can be one of the hardest jobs for a company. Developing your product can be hard enough, but spreading the word? That can sometimes be even harder. In an environment where we are constantly bombarded with advertisements for a myriad of different products, it can be almost impossible to make your products stand out. You can spend millions creating a compelling advertisement that draws the customers in; you can spend countless hours developing that perfect shot, perfect use case, perfect line that captures the product; you can spend decades creating a recognised brand, as you have done here at Emplecix, which stands above all others in esteem within your industry. But the truth is that, no matter how much you spend, when the customer sees the product you have made, all they need to do is simply say no, and you can lose them forever.’ The entrepreneur places both his hands on the briefcase before him. ‘In this here briefcase, I have a product which can promise to revolutionise your marketing efforts. How, you may ask?’ Here, Jake’s lips curve into a smile. ‘By removing the need for any marketing altogether.’

Finding the two clip-locks with his thumbs, Jake opens the briefcase. He removes something small from inside it, then shuts it again. The object he removes is miniscule, barely visible from the table. He uses his fingers to carefully rotate it in between his index and thumb, then lifts his hand in an attempt to better present it to the audience. From my seat at the far end of the room, the object is no larger than a speck, about the size of Jake’s fingertip.

‘This is the TackTile,’ he says, ‘a minute device just barely the size of your nail, which can be placed on any surface – any device. Its tiny surface is covered in millions of nodes that send electrical signals through the skin and into the brain. Merely brushing past it is enough to trigger its effects.’ Jake carefully lifts his hand even higher, moving the TackTile and placing it against his index finger in demonstration. ‘It works by sending what I call “preference-adjusting” signals to the brain of anyone who comes into contact with it.’ He takes a moment to pause, scanning around the room. I do not stray my gaze to check how others are responding to his pitch, but I sense the general confusion. Jake recognises it too. He props himself against it, leaning on a sly smile. He speaks in a confident tone. ‘This device can make anyone like anything.’

My heart stops, the world goes quiet. Everything before me becomes blurry, and I become lost in a paralyzed daze. At first, time freezes, then it begins to be administered in drops, dripping me into occasional consciousness with every heartbeat. I attempt to form a thought, but the silence consumes my mind; I try to query my feelings, but I am empty.

I pass a quiet eternity in ruthless stasis. Somewhere in the vast expanse, I sense something. At first, I feel like it’s a distant ghost attempting to reach my soul. Slowly, I can approach it within the empty world, nudging myself towards movement. With every motion, I become slightly more aware, till the distant feeling begins to acquire more form. I sense it reverberating within me, intangible but familiar. With some blinks of contemplation, I recognise it in my ears. The feeling, it’s a sound. A word. I listen to it carefully.

Amon…

It’s my name. I try to get closer to the sound. It’s a voice.

‘Amon…’

The voice is coming from next to me. 

‘Amon.’

With another repetition, the voice gains crispness. My blurred vision clears, and I turn to see where the voice is coming from. I see my boss David.

‘Amon, what do you think?’

Finally, I am present again. I give my boss a confused blink. He motions his eyes and head towards the entrepreneur , who just finished his presentation, then looks back at me.

‘What do you think of the product? Does it sound like something that might be possible?’

I slowly turn my head to look at the presenter. As I pan over, I see the rest of the table looking at me expectantly. When my eyes land on the entrepreneur–my neighbour, Jake–I see that he, too, is eagerly waiting for me. For the first time since he arrived, I look him in the eyes. For a moment, I scrutinise his gaze, but in it, I find nothing. There is no doubt that he sees me now, and I realise that since the beginning, he has seen me. He came to the company he knows I work at. He presented before the people he knows I work for. He pitched the inventions he knows I created.

I created, and he perfected.

And yet, in his expectant orbs, I recognise a certain sincerity. He is not doing this to torture me, though I have no doubt he must know, at least a little bit, what effect this is having on me. No, even after becoming whatever it is my device has made him, Jake is not cruel. He is waiting eagerly because he is waiting with hope. He wants everyone in this room to see his invention, and want it. He wants everyone in this room to see him.

Somewhere in the silence, I find my tongue. It is constrained, but it remembers how to speak.

‘It’s… brilliant,’ I mutter. Because it is, I think. My cumbersome black box, with its wires and probes, reduced to a tile the size of a fingerprint.

‘What’s that?’ asks my boss, who didn’t hear me.

I look at him, taking a second to regain full control of my speech.

‘It will work,’ I say in a direct, determined voice. I look back at Jake, whose lips are already betraying a slight smile. 

I project my voice so that the whole room can hear me clearly.

‘It’s the most magnificent invention I’ve ever seen.’

Jake’s mouth parts in a wide grin. His eyes are full of wonder, excitement; joy. His eyes are full of hope.

I leave the meeting before the stakeholders, who wait behind to discuss the particulars with Jake. In an apathetic stride, I make my way back to my desk. I sit down. The exact blueprints I was working on earlier are waiting before me, but I cannot remember what I was doing with them.

When the workday ends, I find the lift, then the exit, then my car. When I reach it, I look into the window of the driver’s side seat. In it, I see my reflection. My hair is a disgruntled mess, large bags droop below my eyes. I realise that this is the first time I’ve looked closely at my reflection since the evening my neighbour came into my life. 

The picture before me is surreal. For a moment, I pretend that it is not my own reflection I am looking at. Cleansed of expectation, I look into the image displayed on my car window. I see a corpse looking back at me.

I open the car door and sit down, shutting it behind me. As I placed both hands on the wheel, I have a moment to pause.

‘No,’ I say to myself, ‘no. No, no, no…’

The words come out calm and calculated. The feeling is not anger exactly; there’s something more premeditated about it.

‘I can’t let him take over my life like this.’

My grip on the wheel tightens. Now it’s closer to anger.

‘I’ll fix this,’ I say. ‘I can still fix this.’

I begin the drive back to my apartment on my usual route. Along the way I pass by all the usual sights, though they are of little interest to me. I begin thinking of a way that I could possibly reverse the effects my nightly visits have had on my neighbour. I must use the machine again, I say, but that’s where the thoughts end. How can I possibly reverse the effects of the machine, when it reaches so deeply? Furthermore, do I even understand my own creation? It was only supposed to make my neighbour like silence, but its effects have been… different. It has taken a much stronger, more comprehensive hold of my neighbour than I could have ever expected, twisting him into a creation that has slipped out of my hands in a way I cannot control. But regardless, I know that if my device caused this, it is the only thing that can reverse it. I must use it, I think again. But that’s where the thoughts stop.

I come to a stop at a red traffic light. The rushing swarm of thoughts in my head is making me tired, and for a moment my mind lets go of them from fatigue. My head is left empty for an instant, sending me into a brief panic. My train of thought! I think, I was so close to an idea. I know I was…

In my moment of mental silence, I allow myself to look at my surroundings, and something catches my eye, dispelling all the thoughts swirling around in my mind.

Mike’s Records.

The yellow letters above the grungy, black storefront read. In the windows are visible vinyl records with offensive covers from a myriad of bands I don’t recognise. A smile spreads across my lips. I am no longer worried about finding a course of action.

I spy a place on the side of the road to park my car and turn into it once the lights turn green. I leap out of my car, crossing the road in hops when there’s a gap in the traffic, making it to the store and pushing the door inside.

The music store is a small, single-room shop with shelves on all the walls housing vinyls and CDs. Beneath the shelves there are boxes of various musical appliances, ranging from amplifiers and record players to guitars and keyboards. To the immediate right upon entering there is a counter, behind which stands a clerk, a young man around his early twenties with short black hair and metal outfit. When I enter, he is too busy looking into his phone to notice me.

I walk up to the till with a brisk step.

‘Hello,’ I say.

The clerk looks up at me from his phone. He stares at me blankly without saying a word.

‘I’m looking for a particular band.’

The young man steps to the side with a nod, where he places his hands on the keyboard of a computer.

‘What’s the band called?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know.’

He looks at me with a confused expression.

‘I was hoping you’d help me find it,’ I say.

‘Can you name one of their songs?’ he asks.

‘No.’

His confusion turns to irritation.

‘Well then how do you expect me to find the band?’

I give the young clerk a blank expression. That’s a good question, I think to myself. I realise I have come here with absolutely no way of finding the band my neighbour was listening to.

‘Is it a metal band?’ asks the clerk.

‘Yes,’ I answer.

‘Then that’s a start,’ he continues. ‘Do you know any of the lyrics at least?’

I begin to form my lips into the shape of a ‘no’, when suddenly a realisation grasps me.

‘Hold on a second,’ I tell him. I leave him in a state of drawn out annoyance as I dash out of the store.

I hop back across the street to my car, jumping right to the trunk. I click it open, finding the blueprints I had brought that morning in hopes of presenting my invention to my boss. I regard the plans with a momentary bitterness, remembering how that plan soured in the most detestable way, but then a sweet hope shines from them. If the blueprints can help me reverse the damage caused, then all will be forgotten.

I take the plans from the trunk and push it closed. I almost forget to check for cars as I bolt back across the street.

‘Here,’ I say as I emerge back into the store. I unravel the large sheet of blue paper and plant it on the till.

Since my departure, the clerk found the time to settle back into his phone. His unhappiness resumes when he must put it down again to tend to me.

‘What’s this?’ he asks.

‘Fuck me? No, fuck you! I’ll split your head in two,’ I answer, my finger shooting to the lyrics I scribbled during my anguished push to complete the project.

The young clerk goes back to his computer. He presses a few keys, then moves the mouse a little.

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘that’s pure filth.’

‘Yes!’ I answer, ‘it’s a horrible racket.’

‘No,’ says the clerk, giving me a judgmental look, ‘that’s the name of the band. Pure Filth.’

‘Oh,’ I say blankly. ‘Well, do you have any of their records?’

‘We have some records, yeah. We also have a few CDs. Nobody buys them so they’re on discount.’

‘I’ll take a CD,’ I say. 

The clerk crouches down behind the till. I lean over the countertop enough to see him scanning through a container of plastic CD boxes. He files up to the letter P, then pulls out one of the boxes.

‘This is the album the song you’re looking for is from,’ he says, standing back up, ‘God Wasn’t Hungry So We Fed The Machine.’

‘Perfect,’ I say. ‘And…’

I look around the store, scanning the boxes of equipment on the floor.

‘And something to play a CD?’

The clerk thinks for a moment.

‘We have some old-school boomboxes,’ he says.

I beam at his suggestion.

‘That’s exactly what I need,’ I tell him. ‘I’d like one of those, please. The cheapest one, if you don’t mind.’

I get a quick strange look from the clerk, before he pura the CD down and walks out from behind the counter. I watch him as he walks over to the corner of the store. He crouches down, finding the boombox, then spends a few seconds rearranging the boxes on top of it to access it. CD player in hand, he stands up and walks back behind the till.

Both of us tired by the interaction, we exchange no more words. I pay for the boombox and CD, snatch up my blueprints, then quickly rush out of the store. I assume that the clerk goes back on his phone the moment I leave, but I do not turn around to check.

I plant myself back in my car, tossing the blueprints onto the back seat and the boombox and CD onto the passenger’s seat next to me.

Upon resuming my journey back to my apartment, I run into a heavy traffic jam. I am slightly annoyed, but ultimately determine that there is no rush. Regardless of the time I arrive, my plan will need to be executed at night. I let myself relax a little, calming my mind and inching my car forward whenever the space allows it. 

After a while of standing still, I begin to consider the boombox. I’m stuck with it and not much else for a while, and, considering I’ve never used one before, it wouldn’t hurt to better understand how it works. Making sure the traffic isn’t moving, I open up the packaging and remove the boombox it contains. There are a couple buttons on top for playing, pausing, rewinding and ejecting the inserted compact disc. I feed the included batteries into the back of the device. I see lights come on, indicating that the boombox is on; all it needs is a CD to play. I retrieve the copy of the album I bought just moments earlier and carefully place the CD into the drive at the top. Clicking the cover back down, I tentatively press the play button.

To my surprise, there is no sudden explosion of sound coming from the speakers that causes my ears to bleed. I have become so conditioned to hearing the songs played exclusively in an abrasive manner that I’d forgotten they can sound any different when the volume is reduced. I am pleasantly thrilled, and I even refrain from turning the music off right after I set it to play. I become lost for a second in the unexpected calmness, gazing at the small silver boombox, lost in the crowd of static cars.

Suddenly, I hear a car horn honking behind me. I look up to see that the way has been cleared before me: all the cars are gone, and I am holding up everyone behind me. I briskly move my car forward, forgetting the boombox entirely.

As I continue to drive, I see that the traffic jam appears to be gone, and I can drive peacefully onward. That means, however, that I am no longer given any more long stops to interact with the boombox, and so the CD continues to play as I drive.

Initially, this irritates me. The first track on the album is a caustic one, similar to the one I know from listening through my apartment wall. After some time, however, I grow somewhat accustomed to the music that’s playing. The song that plays after the first is a slower, much more melodic piece, and I start to genuinely like it at first, realising only afterwards that the two songs belong to the same discography. 

When the third song starts playing, I begin to notice a trend. There appears to be a certain narrative to the tracks on the album. The first was an explosive, enthusiastic burst of life, full of energy, jumping into the action without any other preparation; but, as one might imagine, such a swift jump without any warm up can be quite tiring. The second song reflects this drop in energy, being much more mellow, relaxed and slow; a breath of fresh air. After that breath, that moment of respite, the third song wishes to ease its way back into the high energy; and, in a way that I would never expect, I myself wish to as well. 

As I drive and I listen to the music that would typically be far out of my scope of interest, I find myself falling somewhat into it. The sounds, the notes, on their own solitarily beautiful and combined into a symphony of morphing noise. Apart, the songs may be treated by their own merit, but together, they form a story.

I arrive at my apartment’s car park. The moment I turn off my engine and look around me, I’m reminded of my mission. What am I doing? I ask myself, listening to this filth? I turn off the music. I get out of the car and take out the boombox. I can get the blueprints later, I think, and shut the car door.

The elevator takes me up to the eighth floor. I walk out, my feet sinking into the red carpet. I look down the corridor. I can see my neighbour’s door, poking out at me as it did on the first night I invaded Jake’s apartment. I begin my amble down the corridor, slowing as I pass by the door; until, without an explanation as to why, I stop before it. I even take a step towards the brown rectangle, as if I wanted to say something to it.

Tonight, I think, tonight I will set everything right.

But just as I whisper those words in my mind, a strange feeling comes over me. I feel a sudden emptiness brewing inside of me, a certain sadness. It is as if the door responds to my unspoken words.

And for what? it asks me. And why?

I face the bronze letters on the brown surface for a moment. And why?

I allow myself to sink away from thought for a second, landing in feeling. I ask myself the question.

And why?

The feeling answers. I do not want to do it, it says. The invisible force, emanating from the door like a warm plea. I do not want to do it.

In the silence that blooms from that feeling, there is little else. I can hear the soft clicking of distant noises coming from a few other apartments; I can feel my heart beating in my chest. But when I ask my thoughts, my guide through all my troubles, what they have to say about everything, they are quiet. During the most important moment, they are absent. I feel the warmth emanating from the door. I smile.

‘I don’t want to do it,’ I say.

I turn away from my neighbour’s door and walk to my own. I slink into my apartment, stripping off my clothes in a single motion, leaving only the white t-shirt and underwear that saved me from coming into the office in dirty clothes in the morning. I come to my storage closet, still not tidied from the night I scavenged through it for any kind of sustenance, and carelessly pull out some of the bottom boxes. Behind them, I find a box of snacks I bought some time ago. I pick out one of the packets of potato crisps, tear it open, and pour its contents into my mouth, spilling some crumbs onto my white t-shirt.

Taking another few packets with me, I turn around and pick up the boombox, bringing it with me to my bedroom. In a state of delighted bliss, I look past my desk, past all the boxes that line my walls, and find my bed. I stumble over to it, spinning around as I throw my back onto the covers.

I throw the packets of crisps above me, the boombox to my side. I look to the ceiling, finding the nothingness I left there on my last visit. That beautiful, miraculous nothingness.

I take a packet of crisps and open it, dropping it on my chest. I close my eyes. I look for my thoughts; they are nowhere to be found. That blissful, delightful nothingness.

I grope the top of the boombox, looking for the buttons I need. I locate the button to play, and push it down.

11.VII.2024

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