Sleeping Awake

There is something wrong with this world.

She stared at the page for a long time; gazing upon that very sentence with such intensity that time itself seemed to stand still.  She studied the curves of the letters, the beauty of the penmanship, the starkness of the ink against the white page.  She stayed quite still, kneeling by the wooden chest until aching knees gave way to a certain indifference, and perhaps all the world outside of her ceased to exist in that time.

There is something wrong with this world.

What was traveling through her mind as she read these words would be impossible to relay with any precision.  There was no actual elocution, no words, no fully formed concepts.  There was just that sentence and somehow it meant something to her; it unlocked something inside of her.

Philip called her name and her reverie was suddenly broken and all of reality came crashing back to her like a tidal wave.  She felt dizzy and uncertain of her reality.  Her mouth was impossibly dry and it seemed that the very concept of her existence was a vast improbability.

Finally her mind managed to navigate the cobwebs that had somehow grown there and a thought formed.  Yes, there were actual words now, and she knew where she was and she slowly began to regain a semblance of who she was and what her purpose had been.  Purpose? She pondered to herself, Is that the right word?

The next coherent thought that drifted into her mind was the phrase, I will be right down but as soon as she opened her cracked lips to utter the phrase it instantly felt stale and sour in her mouth, like something was innately wrong with it.

Philip. She thought this name to herself once more, and then quite slowly and in a painful manner she tore away the bandage that she had inadvertently sealed over those six letters.  There was no Philip.  Not anymore.  She had imagined him calling her name, or perhaps it was a reflex, the same way you think you hear your phone vibrate when you are expecting an important call.

She stood up and her legs felt weak, like they had forgotten what it was to be used.  She still clutched the tiny aged diary in her hands but it was no longer of any practical concern to her; just another blemish that had grown onto her aging body, a blemish that she was already forgetting about.  Light streamed in from the solitary window of the attic and in it patterns of dust danced about in an almost merry fashion, entirely unaware of their somber surroundings.

When they had bought the house they had been told that it would be sold “as is”, and “as is” included an attic full of molding junk that nobody had any desire to deal with.  Young and able bodied, she and Philip had thought nothing of this minor detraction from the otherwise glorious three story Victorian.  Sure, it had peeling paint and terribly outdated utilities but each repair would just be another chapter in their love story.  At least, that is what they had thought then.  Now, standing alone in this dismal attic she felt so distant from the version of the girl she once was.  What possessed me to come up into this attic in the first place? she wondered.  What was the purpose?

There was that word again…purpose.

At once it came to her and it felt like being hit with a gust of ice-cold air after being trapped in an impossibly hot room; it was both refreshing and terrifying.  There hadn’t been any purpose to her foray into the attic except for a strange desire to explore the only part of the house where no memories of Philip remained.  They had never spent any time in this attic, save for the fleeting seconds when the realtor had gestured up the sagging steps to indicate that there was no water damage, but yes, there were piles of belongings that the previous owner had so carelessly left behind upon dying.

Philip had said, “aw, that’s nothing” and his blue eyes were alight with excitement at all he envisioned in the house. all that they would do to make it a home.  The first house they had ever bought.

Stumbling towards those same sagging steps she pondered how strange it was that she referred to him as “Philip” in her mind now.  She had only used his full name when playfully reprimanding him, and perhaps a few times when coyly calling him to the bedroom.  Aside from that, everyone had known him as “Phil”.  Phil, the craft beer loving electrician who always had a backwards Patriots hat on and loved white water kayaking in the summers and downhill skiing in the winter.

Phil.  She thought his name with a pang and as soon as she closed the attic door behind her all thoughts of the diary vanished, even though she still clutched in her hand.  She placed in absently on Phil’s desk as she passed it, letting it go missing amongst a pile of car magazines and bills that he never opened because he used online billing, and yet he never threw anything away.

She needed to clear her head.  She needed to get some work done.

She navigated to the kitchen, where they had scraped up their every penny to replace the aging utilities with the best models they could afford.  “Best” meant economy of course; he was an electrician and she was an online professor and an aspiring writer.  They made do, but they weren’t rich and they weren’t comfortable with too much debt.  They had chosen each aspect of the kitchen with fragile care, searching for deals (“look honey, $200 off because it’s got this little tiny dent!”) and using YouTube videos to DIY as much as possible.  But they hadn’t gone cheap on the paint.  Oh no, Phil had said, “the kitchen is the heart of the house!”  Phil had done most of the cooking.

She opened the fridge and grabbed an IPA that she was particularly into.  Then she trudged to the bathroom and turned the shower onto the “scathing hot” setting, allowing the tiny room to fill with steam until it became so misty that it was possible to forget where one was and imagine an entirely different reality.

After undressing she used the edge of the sink to pop the cap off the bottle and then stepped under the hot stream of water, enjoying the juxtaposition of the cold beer in her mouth versus the heat on her skin.  She ran though her tasks for the day; lesson modules she needed to post, grading that needed tending to, and the usual household tasks that haunt all adults each and every day.

When she stepped out of the shower she left the empty bottle behind.  I’ll come back for it later she thought absently, and wrapping herself in a rather ratty towel she stood before the fog covered mirror, wiping the condensation away with her hand and assessing herself.  There wasn’t much to see.  She looked too tired for mid-thirties, too old.  But she could chalk that up to a lack of makeup.

As she brushed her teeth, for a brief moment she thought she caught the sight of something move behind her, like a shadow through the steam, but before she could even mentally react to it, it seemed to be gone and her attention was re-focused on a strange series of bumps that seemed to have developed along her jawline.

Acne? she mentally scoffed, at my age?

When she exited the bathroom she was hit by a sudden dizzying sensation—the feeling one gets when they awake in a place that is not their own bedroom and they drown in the sense of being lost as the mind tries to recount where they are and why.

There is something wrong with this world.

She realized she was kneeling on the cold hard wood floors, gasping for breath.  She was suddenly, and obscenely struck with a memory of Phil saying, “you don’t see hardwood like this anymore!”.  She tried to recount what was real.  First her age.  She was thirty-five.  No, she was a teenager still, hence the acne on her face.  No, of course she was an adult!  She was a professor.  She owned a home.  She was married.  No, widowed she reminded herself, but that seemed strange too.

She crawled back to the bathroom; paused by the toilet a moment to see if she was about to get sick, and then she decided it wasn’t that sort of illness.  Did she have a fever?  Was this what it was to go insane?

She pulled herself upright to look in the mirror once more.  It was her face, but it was much older than she remembered it being.  When had she gotten those lines next to her eyes?  What was this puffiness around her chin?  Looking at her jawline she saw the bumps were still there and she moved closer to the mirror to get a better look at the rash.

She realized it wasn’t acne… it was more like bug bites of some sort.  She pressed an un-manicured index finger against them to see if there was any pain.  And then they moved.  The bumps were crawling under her skin; they were alive.

She fled from the bathroom, still wrapped only in her towel.  She found herself blindly scrambling for the study, the strange diary she had found in the attic suddenly, and urgently, remembered.  There is something wrong with this world.

She flipped it open and gazed at the unfamiliar, loping handwriting, the elegant cursive of a world long lost.  The letters seemed entirely familiar and yet they didn’t form actual words; her heart raced as she flipped through page after page of indecipherable scrawling.  As the pages went by the beautiful handwriting became sloppier and sloppier until finally it was recognizable as her own messy, barely legible script.  Finally she came across a phrase she could read: “WAKE UP”.

Over and over she saw those same words etched in a panicky looking version of her penmanship.  WAKE UP. WAKE UP. WAKE UP.

She hit the ground suddenly, her legs giving out as though they no longer even existed.  When her eyes fluttered open again she was back in the attic, staring at the patterns of dust swimming their elegant, lazy patterns in the mid-afternoon sun.  Philip called her name and she blinked hard, trying to reconcile the events of the past few minutes.  Has it been mere minutes? She wondered.  On one hand she was certain that no more than sixty second had passed since she had been in the shower.  On the other hand, she could swear it had been years.

Her hair was dry.  She was fully clothed in her paint-stained “cleaning clothes” that Phil always liked to joke were too sexy for him to handle.  Phil… not Philip.  He called her name again.  She remembered now that he was alive.  How ridiculous that she had thought otherwise, except that only seconds (or was it years?) ago she was certain he had died; certain of that hollow, terrible feeling of emptiness that had come with his passing.  But of course that had just been a dream.  She couldn’t even recall now how he had supposedly died.

She stood up from the splintery wood floors of the ancient attic and opened her mouth to call back to him, to let him know that she must have fainted.  It was quite hot in that attic, impossibly so perhaps.  As she went to yell to her husband her eyes drifted to the still-open diary laying discarded on the floor.

In fine lettering the open page said, “There is something wrong with this world”.