Excerpt: This Life In Bed

I open my eyes and am greeted by a speckled greyness. It is the light of early dawn, or perhaps even early twilight, when your eyes seem to act like television screens turned on, but receiving no signal. When there’s not enough light to really make anything out, but your retinas want to process something. When there are dots of blue and purple and red, flickering through your corneas amongst the blackness, asking to be made sense of, for a pattern or an image to be made sense of.
The constellation refuses to disappear. It sways in front of me, a mass of illogical information, burrowing down the optic nerve. I shut my eyes again for visual respite, and with caution, creating a gradual opening. My eyelids are black borders in the world, and I’m watching in widescreen. I see the thin sliver of grey between the black, a strip of dots and swirls. With fascination, I practise opening my eyes as little as I can, seeing the lids rising up and down to meet each other.
Now I feel in complete control of my eyes. Not the visual aspect of them, but just the shutting, the closing, and the reopening of them. My brain is completely honed into this repetitive function, and I feel I could choose any distance between my lids, and achieve this with eyes. It’s mesmerising, feeling my muscles flex and contort to this movement, the mere squint that is never thought about before, the automatic reflex in brightness. It takes darkness to show my appreciation for this.
I can’t express my feelings about this matter at the moment. I’m lost in this incident, but nothing is being given to any verbalisation of my new routine. Silence is the natural companion of darkness. Any sound now would surely disturb my concentration. It would force my attention elsewhere, rippling the flow of though required here. So I will lie here and wallow in my solitary motions, until I have tried of mastering this skill.
Certainly, it is strange that on no other of my awakening have I been this aware of such motions. I would quite normally open my eyes and shut them again on seeing the brightness, too much for me to register immediately. Or I would close my eyes on seeing that there is not enough light for one to see, if one can ‘see’ an inefficiency of light. One would rather realise it instead. But today, my imagination is caught in the splendour of this element of my physicality.
I say today, but I do not know if is really is day. I mean, I can see it is grey, I know from opening my eyes that there is a half-light present in the room. But I cannot see outside, I do not turn to the window, and even if I did, I would find the curtains to be closed. Therefore, I cannot fathom whether this half-light is the half-light of sunset, or the half-light of sunrise. I can reason that it is not completely night-time yet, for it is was, when I would be unable to see anything but the sheer glistening glory of unfiltered blackness. And to the same logic, if it was fully day, then there would be no grey to grace my hungry eyes. The process of elimination can only go to far. It would be reasonable to say that the current time must either be dawn or, with equally possibility, dusk.
However, I can take an educated guess at the time, for I know that when I went to bed, it was, I can confirm, complete blackness outside, apart from the street lamp, heavy in its yellow cursing outside my window. It belched and burped out its disgusting luminescence onto the pavement, the street, the house facades, quite ignorant to its interruption of the night-time’s moment. The beads and threads of its glow bled through the glass and crept around the curtains, edging past the weighty brown fabric and reaching my presence, betraying the turn of the earth, the parting of the sun, but glorifying the moon in nothing but reflection.
Yes, it was night apart from this disturbance, and as I am not one for long and luxurious slumbers, without starts and fits, then I could reasonably suppose that it was dawn. It being night at the point of my retirement, then given the natural lengths and cycles of human sleep, it was not beyond the parameters of imagination that I had slept until the sun choose to roll around again, or that is to say, the planet rolls about the sun, but the sun surely can no say in what or who may orbit its planes, and chooses nothing.
Or course, staying in the realms of logic’s allowance, I could have slept right through the day until the next fall of the sun in the annual sequence. But it would have been most unlike me to have missed, to have skipped, to have quite shockingly omitted an entire day of my existence through the escape of sleep. I suppose, in the history of mankind, such occurrences have been noted, recorded, examined and quantified. But I, myself, know to me, did not know such a history. Therefore, but some satisfaction, but not complete and wholly comforting satisfaction, did my eyes, and then my mind, and then finally the rest of me following, conclude that the day had started, and I along with it.