I was so tired and overwhelmed. I retreated back to bed. The world flowed on outside and like a pinhole camera, I let only a tiny beam of light through. From inside my dark box, the whole world was distorted, inverted, and flattened into a projection on the wall. Easier to look at reality through peripheral vision, at only the reflection of it passing by.

The window had thin, old, glass, in a chipped-paint frame. I draped towels and curtains overhead. On the glass, a layer of green plastic bubble wrap kept the cold out, tinting my daydreams with an aquarium glow. Drifting in and out of time, I learned the sounds of traffic and the movement of the light, the voices of the birds. I untethered, neither sinking or swimming, in stasis indefinitely.

“There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element.”

(Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7)