Inside This Room, Time Drifts...
A room twelve by eight feet wide becomes a witness: to objects that remember, to time that roughens instead of smooths, to a self that drifts without fully disappearing. Meditation on Isolation.
I enter the room.
Twelve by eight feet. White plastered walls.
Above, a rusted aluminium beam tilts, toppling just as I slide it too far to the right. Below it, the aluminium door swings open, flushed one-thirty degrees toward the bathroom.
At the front, two white curtains mark the entrance, welcoming me in.
This is not a contract for a freelancer, but a summons for a monk.
A sign sits on the desk, barely tilted, non-assertive, playful in print:
No shoes please.
Thank you.
I smile. I take my shoes off.
A soft, white-wool carpet runs the length of the room, stopping at the northern wall. The white wooden roof rises ten feet overhead, exposed beams forming an isosceles triangle. Evenly spaced trusses hold a quiet convection current — enough space to breathe.
Opposite the bed, a black leathered guitar case rests dormant. Inside, a yellowwood Ibanez steel-string acoustic, copper strings weathered by years, the body bowed slightly at the sides. For nearly a decade it kept me sane: in a room this small, but large enough to discover no one else. Only myself.
As morning approaches, objects wake. Shoes. Shirts. A computer that still works off and on, flashes, dies, restarts, remembering the first time the lights came on.
At night, the relics come alive. Shadows stretch across the walls, speaking in tones and melodies only native to me.
I’d talk back.
The wardrobe holds the same clothes, the same shoes. Natural pills and not-so-natural pills from darker years. The same memories, confettied and restaged when perfection felt necessary.
In the corner, one sad pair of trousers.
Tossed aside, now a size too small, it clung to the wall as my body quietly changed. I fought sleep. I barely rose from the bed. It stayed there — holding on, staring, never stopping.
On the top shelf: sleeping pills, relics from an earlier arrival, set aside but never thrown away. Beside them, memorabilia from youth, when my mind was sharp and my words came heavy, unfiltered, raw.
Decay surrounds me. Objects barely resemble themselves. People too. Life sheds its face yearly, greys out, replaces itself with another that looks just like mine. Time didn’t smooth the edges. It roughened them.
Nothing moves. Everything drifts.
Not toward me, away. Memories fragment and recede: facets of former selves, temperaments of pasts.
Phantoms.
Ghosts.
I watch.
As I type, I slow. Words thin. Names slip. Arithmetic falters. The cursor blinks longer between thoughts as I drift somewhere I can’t name.
Not someone. . . something.
Unnamed, misnamed. Not a name I lack, but one stolen long ago, discovered only too late.
I can’t account for much anymore. So I protest. With words, protestable as far as protest can go in a vacuum.
I do it anyway —
I sit laughing, convinced I’m happy. I sob, confused. Sad. Bewildered by echoes with no source, calling my name.
I can’t answer.
If I could go back one year, two, I might have turned the clock. But I can’t.
So I mourn.
When the world shuts me out, this is where I hide.
The carpet still waits.
The door still opens.
The guitar stays closed.
Inside this room, time drifts — and for now,
I remain.