Once the comforts of the ordinary pass, as it invariably should in every season of our lives, he found himself unsettled and agitated, as if he had an insufferable itch on some unreachable part of his backside. Those faces he familiarized have become mere phantoms in those places where they would very regularly occasion. Like the porcupine raises its quills in sturdy defense at the tingling thrill of a unfamiliar situations, he, too, felt as if silent barriers and ancient bulwarks slowly rose from their dusty inactivity. Whatever he did he found doing in a careful practice of parsimony, so that each step in the constituent procedures, though done so many times before, were executed with an alien delicacy. What were committed once to muscle memory tumbled back into the framework of the focused consciousness, such that when he brushed his teeth in this new, foreign landscape, it was very much like he was assembling a shape he dreamt of using toothpicks, plastic knives, and an assortment of modeling glues.
Perhaps it was because he was afraid that whatever it is he might've learned, or in whatever ways he might've changed, during the passing antecedent chapter in his life might dissolve, dissipate, disappear when new sensations and circumstances flood through him. Without those buttresses that he identified as the pillars of his comfort zone, the sturdiness that he once felt became uncertain and tentative.
How did it once feel, he wonders aloud, to have not have been conscious of these facts before? As a drunkard of that poisonous ignorance I once habited, he almost yearned that amorphous, opaque ambrosia in a way that was most bittersweet and confusing. He didn't want to regress, no, that would be Chinese water torture, but he didn't want to let all that happened slip away in a muted collapse, a silent decimation.
He couldn't withstand, however, those who languished in their memories so vivaciously that it consumed them, stole their consciousness and excitement so easily that the dimwitted thief or bureaucrat flipped those individuals anyway that they could to access any valuables concealed or forgotten by that patron of ignorance.
He wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them awake, jettison from that lethargic realm of illusion and bring them into the world again. He wanted to reanimate them. He wanted to yell, "we are still alive, you and I, and it isn't until our final breaths that this can change. Don't count these numbered breaths, but taste the air in each and every one of them. Feel the texture of every individual intake and don't let the air simply pass through your lungs and digest mechanically into dioxides, but feel that miraculous exchange of life occur. Feel your feelings and let them digest you entirely."
That grey workroom of remorse. The shelves spilling over with expired things. He wanted to color them with fresh new paints and coat them with newly extracted lacquer.
