He thinks maybe he's known a Before. Not drifting.
Drifting is the only word for this. He thinks maybe it's life, but life is . . . living. But—if this isn't living, then . . . what is?
Before, he decides. Before was living. Probably. Maybe.
He thinks of Now as an ablive. Not living. And the After? He thinks of it as sleep. He has no reason to believe that the ablive that is Now will ever end. Living had an end, though. Ablive probably will too, and after Now is over, he wants something else. He wants After to be different. Peaceful. Now is itchy. Deep, deep down, Now itches. Now pulls at the back of his brain. Now runs its fingers along the inside of his spine. Now makes After feel very far away.
Before, he thinks, was nicer. He . . . he's not sure, but he doesn't believe that he wanted Before to end. Something. . . .
Something got left behind. Or taken. He doesn't know what. He can't think of anything that has ever been taken from him—except for Before, of course. But the more he tries to remember Before, to find what's missing, the more Now itches.
He tries to forget living. Before will never come back.
He can see stars. Outside the window. Huge incorporeal gatherings of neon gas. Chalk marks so small that he knows if he could stretch his hand out the window, he would be able to smudge and smear them along the blackboard of the sky with his thumb. He reaches, and his fingertips meet the glass he'd forgotten exists.
He rasps out a laugh.
There's movement out of the corner of his eye. He refuses to look. It's not real. Probably. Maybe.
Actually, he doesn't know what's real anymore. If anything is. Maybe Before didn't exist. Doesn't exist. Won't exist.
All he's certain exists is Now. Even space, even the window, might not be real. But Now is. Now is inside of him. Outside of inside can't be trusted. So, he decides, nothing that he can see is confirmed to be real.
Which is why, when he sees a face in the window, he doesn't believe in it. A stubbly, ragged beard. Eyes pulsating yellow fear. Hair damp with years or rain from its forehead.
The first time he saw the face, he was a believer. He yelled and pounded on the window. He cowered away. He invited it in.
Now he's certain the face doesn't exist, so when he see it, he doesn't look long. The eyes are now blossoming orange clouds. He thinks maybe his are too, so he looks away and pretends he didn't see it and forgets.
He's started breathing differently. The air is halved, so he tries to breathe in half. He thinks maybe it works. Why hasn't he been half-breathing this whole time?
It makes him tired, though. Now is restless in his stomach. Rolling on its side and scraping its hands down his throat. He suddenly wants so badly to just sleep, but Now won't let him.
So he does what he doesn't want too. He looks at the face in the window, and pretends he can't see the orange clouds, and imagines that the eyes are red and gold behind the mist.
Sometimes there's another face. Blue, with purple and black Christmas lights framing it and one eye a comforting abyss. If he stares at the eye long enough, in its depths he can see a red-haired woman, whom he thinks he might have seen in the star second-closest to the window. She seems nice, and if he squints, he can see green flowers sprouting from her ears. The green flowers make him sad. It must be painful to have flowers in your ears. He feels sorry for her, even though he doesn't know her. Probably. Maybe.
He thinks about her, even when he turns away from the faces in the window. Thinking about her settles the roaring beast of Now. He feels his legs blur. They can't hold him up.
He falls. The last thing he sees is a sad smile on the face of that strange, beautiful woman with the green flowers in her ears growing ever larger and turning grey.
He smiles. Such a beautiful thing to see before sleep.
A/N: Well, that's it. I've an idea for a third chapter, but I dunno. Hope you enjoyed. Thank you for reading.