In the darkness: box edges merge with box edges, merge with empty space. You roll your head and eye, memorising the impression of shape and volume, the fading lines of contrast against the increasing flat noise. Your pocket of visibility beyond the curtain is shrinking now, not obviously so, but you feel the decrease in granularity. The rain is noticeably loud, bleeding into and over the scraping of wood, sound and vision becoming a single lulling white-noise.
What are you reminded of? Hubbub; a long and loud night outdoors, moving inside. Other nights of rain and dark and being giddy. Personless quiet against the noise of the world. The chittering of your guarantor as you hustle inside together, long ago and in some other place, or so you assume, but still leading directly here. Out of the rain and into the entryway, space enough for one person to comfortably circle another, musty with coats. A fan chart on the wall; more than one. A topology of some series of lives. All against the background of some undefined clanking industry nearby and a morse code of conversation: burst, quiet prompt, burst. References to prior conversations, not all of them with you, situations and scenarios for which you were not present and full of people you did not know. It was done with camaraderie, nodding and an acknowledgement of your patience, as though they recognised that a part of their personality was wedged forever open and they begged your pardon, try not to get too much on you. The pauses existed purely to collect acknowledgement on your part before the next sentence or two could be released, a process you could not help but be part of. It felt invasive, for all its couching and deference and apologies. You formed the awkwardly shifting soil of conversation, growing increasingly guilty at your own frustration.
Your sponsor was a true byproduct of those meetings, you realise now, foreverafter stuck on communicate. You are reminded of something else, but you do not know what.
The bubble of coherent darkness in which you can discern content continues to recede, as though your eyes are failing. You want to squirm but are still seized up.