Persistence

You almost locked yourself out of your apartment on your way to work this morning, twice. The first time, you had leapt out the door with the adrenaline rush of lateness and nearly pulled the door shut behind you. The second time was after you had reached in to grab your keys out of the small ceramic bowl you kept by the door specifically to store them in. Then, knowing that you had taken care of that little task, you turned away, not noticing until the door was closed but not quite latched that you had just as deliberately placed the keys back in the bowl as soon as you had picked them up.

What was wrong with you? You managed to reflexively kick the door back open before it shut entirely, stubbing your toe but reversing its trajectory so that it flew open and bumped against the doorstop, placed there to prevent the knob from punching a hole in your apartment's interior wall. Then you snatched up the keys again, feeling their metallic zigzags hitting the palm of your hand in exactly the same way as they always had before. This time, you gripped them tightly in your hand, paying attention to assure yourself of their continued existence, as your free hand -- well, not free exactly, but there were two fingers that weren't currently engaged in holding your travel coffee mug -- pulled the door definitively shut. You twisted the knob one way, then the other, verifying that it was locked, and then you raised the keys to fasten the deadbolt.

There were two keys on the ring that were quite similar. One was for your door's deadbolt, the other was for the laundry room in the basement, and the landlord apparently thought it wasn't up to him to make any kind of distinction between them. You tried first one, then the other, then the first one again, and that was the one that finally sunk home into the slot. Sighing, you ratcheted the bolt and turned to descend the stairs.

Your foot came down hard on the bare floorboards a good two feet before the dropoff of the first step down. You had been expecting it already, letting your weight fall down the anticipated nine inches. Instead, the crack of your work shoe's heel on the wood jolted you back into full awareness. You actually stopped and looked ahead of you , wondering if the stairs had always started that far away from your front door. Finally, you decided that they must have, and watched your feet closely as you began to descend toward the street. Your hand bumped the rail and a thin thread of hot coffee spilled out of your mug's little mouth slot and down over your hand. You winced involuntarily, but did not allow the pain to distract you as you brought one foot down after another, each bringing you closer to street level.

In the apartment building's vestibule, you tugged on the front door's handle several times before remembering that it actually swung outward. You were glad there was no one else around to witness your continuing difficulties; this was starting out to be a jim dandy of a day, but maybe you could still salvage your good mood if you didn't have to acknowledge your apparent idiocy to anyone else.

It was the sounds from the street you noticed first. You initially thought it was something about their timbre, the way the hum of the cars and trucks and buses sonically collided with the constant conversation and rolling rattletrap gaits of people, overlaid by the pervasive buzz of everything electronic in the air, random streaming phones and buzzing earbuds; it all seemed to be combining in new, unexpected ways. You made sure to keep your feet walking in their accustomed pattern down the street, but as you continued you tried to figure out why everything sounded so different on that day.

You soon figured out that it wasn't any individual sound that seemed any different than it did on any other walk to work; it was the way the sounds fused together into the usual morning tapestry. Or, rather, the way they didn't quite fuse; it was almost as if they were steadfastly refusing to fully coalesce. Every sound wave around you was apparently asserting its independence, making sure that it was heard, melding with no other, so that instead of a wave of noise, you were hearing thousands upon thousands of individual sounds.

Not only that, but there were so many sounds, embedded in the mix, that didn't sound familiar at all: odd roarings, distant and diffuse; mysterious clickings that were much closer to you than any physical object that could have made them; a high sort of singing that seemed to soar up into invisible ultrasound and back down again without caring about the difference. It made what should have been the most mundane act in the world -- walking the same street you always did, toward the same place you always went -- an act rife with newness, which made you equally fascinated and unsettled.

A city bus rolled by, every individual huff of its superheated engine giving it the aural aspect of an old-fashioned steam train as it passed. You started to wonder, smelling the burnt exhaust molecules left in its wake... Your sense of distraction leaving your apartment had at first made you consider if you were being extra-forgetful, but now you postulated that you were experiencing the morning with a sense of acuteness he had never experienced before, and that was what was driving him to distraction.

With this in mind, you started paying more attention to the people around you, sharing the sidewalk as they all made their morning pilgrimages. In them, you saw the usual spectrum of human features, but something about the morning light gave them a kind of clarity you had never seen before. You realized these must be, for the most part, the same people you always passed as you made the fourteen blocks' distance to your office. Today, however, you noticed every crease in their faces, each pore on each nose. The sunlight seemed to fill every square millimeter with easily readable information, each disappointment or triumph etched there, all readily decoded. Although you couldn't have articulated them if you had been pressed to, you imagined that you had some of specific sense of the life of each passerby, its general shape and tenor, and where the scales would likely have fallen if this happened to be their day of ultimate judgement (and, you suspected, if you were to look even more closely, you might be able to determine that fact as well). All was plainly evident on that bright morning, becoming as clear as if some eternal morning fog were burning off of everything around you.

For long moments, you reveled in this feeling, this revelation of every object around you, becoming acutely aware that you could, with one glance, see three sides of each building you approached. Somehow, they were starting to unfold like origami, opening to tell you all their secrets, fighting for attention in a riot of morning activity like you had never seen.

This was when you started to feel uneasy. Along with the clarity every new exposed facet of architecture and biology and ambient audio around you, also came the delineation between those individual items. And within that delineation, spaces began to grow. As contradictory as it seemed, you began to *hear* the sliver of silence between the heel-clack on the sidewalk and the echo of it returning from the nearby building facade. The seams between overlapping layers of leaves swaying in the anemic tree you passed under began to have as much of a presence as the leaves themselves, the corner between the north- and west-facing sides of a building so distinct that they might have been the far side of the moon.

Your feet kept moving forward along their accustomed path, but your mind began to reel within its bony cage. It was as if the reality of the day were being continuously ratcheted up, and was now starting to push uncomfortably past its natural constraints. Commonplace things were starting to look like garish cartoons, the world becoming shot through with larger between things, splitting and dividing the world around him over and over. You weren't sure how much longer your feet would continue to come down on solid concrete, if things continued this way. How long until you inadvertently put your foot down in a yawning crack that was merely the space between one pavement block and the next and you fell through, never to be heard from again?

Little cracks of sunlight began to appear between the larger objects at that moment, as if the car, or stoplight, or office building, or whatever you were looking at began to actually fly apart in slow motion. Between all the individual parts, you were beginning to actually see slivers of the pervasive bright, blue-pink morning air. The world was breaking down, there was no denying it now, and in your fear you kept moving unerringly straight ahead, unable to do anything else.

You now avoided looking at your fellow pedestrians. You didn't want to experience the disintegration that you suspected must be happening to them as well. How would your mind rect, you couldn't help but wonder, if you suddenly started to see bright background morning light leaking through the separated features, for your face to feel the breeze blowing through the empty spaces between everything, which were becoming more pronounced with each passing second?

You couldn't even close your eyes, fearful that you would find that your body was separating into its constituent parts, just as everything else around you was. You didn't think your mind could stand lowering your eyelids, only to find, between lid and lashes, and even between the lids themselves, an unceasing flood of late-spring sun, which seemed determined to find its way into your mind by any and all means available.

Yet you moved forward, legs churning under your conscious mind, the motion apparently being the only thing keeping you from flying apart entirely, all the while more aware that you was merely a collection of loosely bound shapes, moving past and around other bundles of shapes, wondering when the moment would come that you would no longer be able to differentiate between "they" and "me", but knowing that it would be soon, so soon...

Off on your right, something caught the attention of your fragmenting vision. As you swiveled your eye parts to find it, you realized that it was not something missing, but something that was blessedly present; the absence of absence. There was a patch of world over there where the sunlight was not bleeding through every increasing gap, not pummeling your brain into submission with the sheer volume of its presence. In that area, there was dimness still binding in the world, which soothed you like an oasis. Your feet -- so distant and disconnected now that you could not see how they could be effectual at all -- turned instinctively toward this darker bit of the world, and headed toward it, with all the measured restraint of a drowning swimmer meting out the last of his strength in pursuit of a savior's boat.

Before you realized it, you had passed into an area that, on any other morning, would have been the paved street that ran out in front of your apartment building. It resembled nothing of the sort now, the parallel yellow and white lines rising from the asphalt and beginning to tilt crazily, the vehicles flying by resembling little more than clouds of angry metal shapes that barely held their relative distances to each other, each gap filled with the same pervasive background light that permeated everything else. Everything else, that was, except for the blessedly coherent section ahead of him.

You were so intent on getting to that place, before you dissolved entirely, that you paid no particular attention to the fact that you was, as far as anyone around you was concerned, stepping out into morning rush hour traffic, and before you knew it, you were surrounded by buzzing, angry collections of metallic shapes flying by at inexplicable speed. You could have sworn, at one point, that you intersected at the same place at the same time with one of them; you winced in anticipation of some kind of collision, imagining that it might be the thing that finally undid all your tenuously connected parts, but with a grazing sensation that brought to mind the image of handfuls of sand being thrown through the air at each other, the danger slipped over and around and through him, and was gone.

Emboldened, he kept moving toward that area of coherence... on any other morning, the distance to the far side of the street would only be a few dozen meters, but in this disjointed, falling-apart universe you appeared to be occupying, it seemed to be maddeningly distant. But, you resolved, as long as your dissipating legs would carry you toward it, you would try to reach it.

Even as you neared, the intervening objects continued to fly apart, the shimmering morning light between their parts threatening to blind you. You tried to keep your focus on what was starting to look more and more like a blossom, an area where the real world was either not separating, or was actively starting to come back together. There was something at the center of that place, but it was hard to make out because of the way your vision was not only becoming more and more diffuse, but straining harder and harder against the overwhelming presence of all that clear, blue background air. But still, there was something there, some solid heart that seemed to be holding the world around it together...

You lifted your foot and hopped up onto what used to be the curb on the far side of the street, relieved beyond words that you actually recognized it for what it was, thanks to the increasing solidity of this part of the world. You began to move forward with even more determination, feeling (but not looking down to verify) that your own body was becoming more whole as you walked.

The center of this zone of sanity was becoming clearer, revealing itself to be a thin, striding figure, obliviously gathering the world around itself as it walked. It moved with purpose, much as you imagined he must have looked on most other mornings, only on the other side of the street, and moving in the opposite direction from you. Was this person -- a man, you determined as you moved ever closer -- doing the same thing you had planned to do this morning; to walk to work, mostly ignoring the same old world as it passed by? So why could he resist the disintegration of everything? what was this person doing differently?

You found himself moving into the path of the man, the reassuring feel of the pavement under your disjointed feet growing stronger and stronger as you neared. You let out a long breath of relief, feeling your own body gain coherence along with the rest of the surrounding world, as this unusual person approached.

Out of all the horror of dissolution that you faced that morning, there was one final moment that made your entire body flood with gratitude and relief... When the walking man, the one who drew the world back into sense as he moved through it, lowered his eyes from somewhere on the horizon, and locked your gazes together. Then, as if passing some sort of magic by look alone, you immediately felt yourself as another nexus, drawing the appearance of the world back into line with the way it actually was. You looked around yourself, watching bricks become reknitted into their lattices, human beings accumulating out of what had been mere swirling clouds of organic shapes.

The man stopped walking. Now the two of you stood, just looking across the blessedly small gap between the two of you, regarding each other coolly. It was such a relief not only to see this solid, strong man standing before you, but to feel that you were being seen, as well. The man you stood before was handsome, not just because of the way his features obeyed the laws of physics as you had always understood them, but because of the way he seemed to be holding the world together. You found that you wanted to stay in that miraculous force field, all the time. If the world was determined to fly apart in every place except this one, this was where you wanted to stay. The only question was if you were going to be allowed to.

To find out, you slowly raised one hand, reaching out to the man who kept the world together. A long moment passed, and you began to worry, suddenly afraid that the man would sadly shake his head and continue walking, dooming you to watch him and his field of coherence disappear into the distance, feeling the sun working its way into you, between all the parts of you, until you finally dissolved into bright blind morning sky.

But that's not what happened. The man raised his own hand, and pressed it into yours. And together, the two of you looked into each other's eyes, as the world continued to unravel around them, save for the slowly-expanding field they produced, your combined strength spreading out from you in waves, knitting it all back together.