Time agglutinates into the air like flour on waves of boiling water. It collects in the corners of rooms and rooms feel smaller. The air is clogged, the water is dimmed, and you turn the blinds but the slants of light only seem to further heat the room--now banded with shadows--so you close them again, or just turn and struggle to breathe in the striped heat. You step into another room, perhaps, but it is the same.
So you smoke, but to no benefit--its curls creep into the nooks and push each other backward toward your tightened throat. You need air, you say to yourself, and you step outside but it is now dark, alleys are illogical, and you can scarcely think of somewhere to go. But you go there anyway.
Alleys across streets crossing into each other, from reckless beginnings to indeterminable ends, you find a way between dumpsters and dirty trees, sticky ground like pitch and the dark sky collecting over your head. You are heading toward a point and, though you walk faster, you only accelerate the closure of the trapezoidal facets angling into that point. So you smoke again, but to no benefit.
The sky seems a giant coal for the roiling heat. And there is smoke all around you and you believe, perhaps, that you are growing but you are not, the trapezoid is merely closing in. You could run to another corner but the tetragon collapses into you on account of your motion, the next corner is more cramped, and you notice that the clumps of time are larger and stickier than before--so you try not to get near.
You smoke again, but now it hurts--there is so little space for that smoke to escape. So you sit still, and watch the collecting lumps and the closing in--the collapsing quadrangle and the limits to your exertion. Where, you ask yourself, did it begin? Was it always closing in? Do we begin so blind--so little sensible to our situation? Was sight--blasphemous joy though it were!--so gained over time?
I arrived here, as I have told you, through a collection of powers, anterior and posterior to my arriving. Those powers are, in other words, still collecting. You will notice that I have had to begin again many times. For this folly, I have set up many shapes around myself--all closing in, every one collapsing. The prismatoid, however, falls into itself differently than the quadrangle. The quadrangle is much less violent and even less rapid in its inwardity.
You will have noticed my errors as they occurred. One reached out to me but the code was confused. Confidence was expressed but displaced between persons--confidence of another in my security can do nothing for my security. I have little hope in the vigilance of such angels; or those who might watch me like a monkey in a zoo. I have repeated, like a beast with little code, what is necessary, the bare minimum even, but have been left to my wiles with every development.
Ulla helps, sometimes, but often can be so senseless.
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