Poemander

I watched how people carry themselves, I liked to observe how they carry the shape of them. On the bus, in the subway, on the streets, at work. I asked myself, what am I doing here? I didn't know, I thought I was wasting time while others do stuff. I saw people taking animal shapes and animals acting like humans. They bleated and quacked, I listened. Some people looked as if they were made of rubber, others of wood, walls had faces. I watched myself watching them and I asked myself – who is watching? I didn't know, I couldn't think. I began to notice one thing though, there was a gap. A gap between them and their shapes. I watched my hands, there was a gap between them and myself. The gap sometimes started to widen, first slowly, then faster, until the frantic expansion taking the whole space, up to the point when there was nothing but the gap and this piercing silence...

Other times the gap narrowed, dwindling exponentially until there was no space between the shapes and the objects, all jumbled together into a screeching mass, smaller then the point of a needle lancing my eardrums.

I looked in the mirror, there was nobody with the eyes of you looking at myself. I didn't know that I saw the gap, I thought that I saw you and you – me. I asked myself if I was here, or was it someone else. There was an issue with it, however, – I couldn't say what is 'here'. So, another question has grown into a big bubble ready to burst: “Here is where?”.

Moving along the damp corridor I saw nothing and only the strong smell of mould would suggest that I was approaching some kind of a passageway. Indeed, I discovered a staircase, probably leading into the basement, I couldn't tell for sure though, as at this moment I completely relinquished every last bit of certainty. The guitar string suddenly snapped and writing her name in the sky I went down in a free fall – out into nothing.

I was still asleep when I heard deep rumbling breaths, there was a tiger in the other corner of the room. He looked at me as I froze in fright. His eyes were shallow, the eyes of a beast. Unable to move I lay in awe. An enormous squeal come up to my throat but only materialised in a hoarse whisper as if there was a cotton ball stuffed down the windpipe. So long since I first started to feel presence, a continuous perturbing presence of someone behind my back. In the back seat of my car, behind the wall. I lived with it preparing for the end, like rehearsing a play, I stood each time looking right in the eye... This time was different, the fright was real. Tiger was ready to pounce. Three, two, one... At once, it all collapsed in my head – a house of playing cards! As if strings of a sibylline musical instrument, the light filaments filled up the room. They vibrated with inexplicable harmonies unfurling up in the air the mesmerising geometries of colour. The gap opened and with a great magnetising force the eyes of the tiger sparkled pulling me into their bottomless crevasses. From their depths I looked out and saw a person lying in the other corner. No he wasn't me, I wasn't him – I was the tiger!