Slip
How can you be sure where you stop and the world begins?
Walking down the hallway towards his room, Schuldig expertly juggled the thoughts that flitted through his mind. Some remained, continually rebounding in his mind, before he deftly knocked them away. It was an ongoing balancing act, a highwire show that no-one else ever saw. One the one hand, the unaware intruders, bumbling in with their clumsy thoughts on lunch or 'stress' in their lives – their boss, their money, their girlfriend finding out about their wife. Occasionally, and these were often mere whispers - almost lost in the unending melee that was his mind – he found something good. Not good in the way most normal people consider morality. Good for the guilty. That was what balanced out this infernal mental see-saw. Him – the guilty.
Today, inexplicably, he fumbled.
It was not a silence followed by the world rushing in, it was not a wavering or a desperate clutching as something indescribable slipped away, not a disorienting loneliness and panicked search for himself in the mess. It was just a realisation that he somehow didn't exist anymore. It was as if the collective consciousness had just started to have a more dominant voice, and then not even that.
There were only thoughts.
Hitting the brakes, a rebuttal, two notes of an earworm, vague feelings, emotions. Almost all coherent, structured thought slowly bled away into a extreme, base world of sensation and urges.
A sharp hiss overlaid everything for a second and the world shuddered. A gasp. Something, fleetingly recognised the sound and sensation as a gasp.
Breathing! Focus on –
Carpet pressed into a knee, staring at someone in a mirror, a knife, the taste of an apple, a hand pressed against a shoulder. A hand, that hand…
Dog, phone, turn here, three words of a poem, peonies, frustrated, betrayed, lost, a cheek against a shoulder. That –
The smell of carrots, a sneeze, nerves, a maths problem, a skyline, the flick of a lighter, fear.
A smell. Stolen Marlboro smoke, a hint of starch, an expense- never- disclosed cologne.
A top spinning, grass, an indistinguishable yell, loneliness.
A voice, somehow cutting through the noise. The syllables, the tone, the words.
"Schuldig!"
The world slid to a halt, snagged on this passing thought that it somehow couldn't let go.
Slowly opening eyes to reveal a viewpoint he barely recognised as different, that he barely recognised as his own, he found all he could see was the weave of white fabric.
Oh, but he knew that fabric.
Memories are strange, he knew that – he lived in a mixture of his own and other people's – they could change, be replaced, be added. But somehow, when all his other memories were subject to circumstance and timing, it took an external source, an external force, to hold his identity safe.
A force who just happened to wear Armani.
