I sit alone.
In a room.
The room is bland, and boring, and without detail.
If I want it to be square, it is square.
If I want it to be a sphere, it is a sphere, and I can stretch my legs in the newfound comfort of an added dimension.
If I want it to be red, the room is red.
If I want the wall to be perfect chrome, then I'll see only my distorted face, curved across perfect chrome encapsulating my form, reflecting and refracting eternally across one single, infinite surface.
I'd rather not see that.
The room is a cube, the walls... An ugly yellow? The sort of egg-shell white that ages poorly on drywall, tinging yellow from ages of existence.
The ceiling is a popcorn ceiling. One doesn't often notice those until you've spaced out on LSD or Shrooms and stared up at your imagination, and your imagination lovingly painting stories for you out of the little nubs and balls.
At the center of the ceiling is a single light. It's the sort that might as well not be on most of the time, it's dull glow is no brighter than a TV screen or a computer monitor, further contained by the frosted glass dome that's secured over it.
I lay on the comfortless, worne-from-pacing carpet and stare up at that ceiling.
There is no furniture in my room.
No windows.
No doors.
My mind wandering...I invented this room, if you were curious.
I don't recall when.
Or how.
Not like they're great mysteries, I spend precious little of my spiraling time on navigating the decaying halls of youthful memories.
The things that lurk in such ancient grottos of structureless, dream-like activities... Let's just say, it's enough to make you want to build a room, and lock yourself away in it.
I'm happier not understanding why, exactly, I'm in this room. It's easier to let such nightmares rot in their echoing chambers, repeating their motions like a song, getting played over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until the words don't even mean anything anymore.
No, I'd rather be here. It's safe and comfortable.
I spent so long here, so many fond memories here.
The walls shift, moving as I please, painting out a massive battlefield. Grass is scorched as red plasma arches over a swarm of beasts.
Insect-Like, they chatter as they move under a torrent of plasma. Some bolts of red-hot ionized energy strike a member of the hoard, popping it like a zit on a moving, writhing shape encompassing the field.
And it's all swarming and moving and shifting towards a bunker, where a couple of beaten down soldiers desperately try to keep their automated turret running. It clunk-clunk-clunks with every rapid, charged blast. To a tempo as fast as their own beating hearts, under the heat of the plasma sticking to concrete, pill-box walls, the two soldiers frantically fought away one bug, and then two, and then eight.
It was a losing battle, but you need not see the end.
The room is as it was once more, a simple, windowless, doorless, boring little room.
Except for the ceiling. The light is no longer a shitty dome-encapsulated bulb, flickering 60 watts and a shoddy 200 lumens into a clean, but old and over-used empty room. It is now a pair of glorious stars, dancing in a gorgeous blue sky. Both of them are, of course, too bright to look at, but should you try, one is a smaller blue ball of fire. It circles it's larger, red partner.
Blue star-stuff, still aflame from heat and pressure, spreads in circles and rings around the two stars, lighting up the peculiar, foreign sky.
There is no ceiling. There is no light. Only this room, and a sky full of two stars orbiting each other in a beautiful dance.
Of course, they're probably actually ripping each other apart like animals, their force of personality so great, so heavy, that contact between the two will leave only an empty space so vast and simultaneously tiny that reality will continue stuffing it, trying fruitlessly to fill it, until the end of time.
But that's thousands of years from now, and we can just anthropomorphise stars to take on whatever traits we want in the moment, can't we? We put a smiley face on Sol, I can put a top hat and a ball gown on the two stars that exist in my own damn room.
. . .
Hmm, I should reorganize myself some. I've invited you into my room, and I've gone on a bit of a tangent.
It's easy to get lost here, painting worlds out of walls.
And I want to explain it, truly.
I need to.
More than any words can express.
But for tonight, I'm all out of words.Goodnight.
YOU ARE READING
1st Person
AléatoireShort Story Inspired by a weird night of self-reflection. Also, might not be **that** short.