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You allow yourself to relax into your paralysis. You could be comfortable here, for as long as it lasts, some small time no doubt. Release your too-tight grip and surely all those long and life-formed habits will reassert, just as breathing must. Are you truly even paralysed? Were not your arms arrayed in some form when you fell and now distinctly otherwise? Surely your legs and feet could not have been so unnaturally placed?

You must simply be moving yourself when unaware, in automatic fidgets and jerks. It is only your conscious control which is gone while your body continues autonomously, as though from a low tolerance for boredom. If that awareness does not come from a specific memory then at least it seems apt, say that it is a recognition of a behaviour which must be long habit-formed. Associated with it is the guess that if you can only self-distract with thoughts of some other set of things entirely, some set of light fancies, then you might eventually find yourself having moved again. Perhaps your body will have snaked or pulsed its way fully across the floor. Perhaps you will awake standing or otherwise differently oriented, outside this place, beyond the greater structure, on a deck or shore having already opened and closed and locked the door to these rooms behind you. You would be dusting your hands, grinning wryly, having found and implemented some solution, no part of those interactions requiring any specific effort or conscious enactment.

Give yourself over to some starter fancy, allow it to pass, then check your new disposition; in such a manner you can plot some points, gather some data. Fancy and check then fancy and check again and in such a way achieve confirmation, pin down the specific attributes of your physical drift, the unconscious repositioning of limbs, just as you might thwart a dream by revealing it in its impermanence.

Even freed from having to concoct an alternative and more active plan, you realise that you cannot think of a single suitable distraction to enact. You are far beyond your standard set of expectations and experience, at least as far as memory-habit suggests, and have too strong a desire to leave, to not be facing these circumstances or the occupant of the room, too strong a desire not to have to force matters to any kind of conclusion. You fight off scalp and facesweats, the shift of heats from embarrassment to expectation of failure, something you clearly associate with having to take any decisive action, even if only involving yourself, and especially through a situation for which you have no context, or at least none remembered.

You should construct some story, or focus on a riddle from your childhood, assuming you can ever again recall such a thing, and so find yourself having-acted and not still, interminably, having-to-act.

You do not.

You may have moved ·

#Fiction