Over all else, the inundation continues; the layering of noise is as though you are in a much larger room with a hundred loud conversations taking place simultaneously and you have lost the facility to selectively bring into focus just that which is directed toward you. Some long-instilled behaviour insists that you attempt to decode it, you can feel the associated mental weariness spinning up, but you stop yourself from nodding or shaking your head in faux comprehension.
Your back is cool now that you have exposed it, still damp, to the air. Your light clothes cling to it and to your legs. You wiggle them onto their fronts, bringing your belly into contact with the floor, the touch and pressure move the sense of wetness there instead. When you are able, you find it surprisingly agreeable to move forward again, slowly and under some control, pushing forward with your toes this time. You begin with some tentative and synchronous shoving; then try tiny, alternating toe-steps, as though you were a very long-bodied biped with ridiculous vestigial legs placed at the two corners of yourself farthest from your head.
The smoothness of the floor, save the boundary-changes of planking, brings little enough irritation to the skin of your face, certainly causes no outright abrasion. Eventually the tugging does begin to annoy, but you are able to chin your head onto its other cheek and continue. You wheelbarrow yourself in this manner headwards into the box-space, not quite centrally. As you make progress you realise that the gap is not square, that the boxes are at a tapering angle, shallower at the opening than at the rear. There appears to be sufficient room here for you to curl yourself wholly into, if you had been able to curl.
You eventually bump the far wall, or some box beyond which is further rearward—you do not yet have sufficient experience of the nook and its contents to easily differentiate one from another—and come to a halt. If you had more light you might be able to examine the sides of these boxes for text or other markings. Your face is close enough to the leftmost side-box that you can bring your head throat-to-shoulder, extend your tongue and run it across the small amount of surface that you can reach in little taps. It tells you nothing, your head is too far away, your tongue too short and lacking in fine sensation to understand any surface-differentiation. You do it a few more times anyway, adjusting your angle slightly, until your neck and shoulders ache and you pull back.
There are fragments of wood, or sawdust, or plain dust, on your tongue, but you do not have the saliva necessary to spit them away. You chew on them instead, but learn nothing much. They may taste of wood, or of paper, but the sensation is so slight that it is just as likely to be imagined. The dryness of your mouth makes you thirsty. The taste, or otherwise, of the fragments make you hungry. The rain sounds and sense of being cocooned make you sleepy. If nothing else, you are gaining more of a sense of your own body’s functions and requirements. You ignore them as best you can.