Staring At The Ceiling

Laying down on a couch.
My mind nearly blank.
What am I doing here?
Attention moves back and forth with the sounds coming from the TV Speaker. Breaking news kept dropping like hot potatoes. The presenters are having a subtle debate on whether the war has finally come to an end.

On the background, gentle bubbling sounds coming from the gas stove. The kettle is whistling softly, demanding attention.

I wonder what's beyond the boiling point of water. Isn't it interesting to use one form of gas to make another form of gas?

Plain tea or tea with milk? Perhaps none of the two. Will drink traditional herbs instead.

Feeling heavy headed lately, although body feels as light as a feather. It's because you're not fully inside your body right now!

But isn't the head part of my body? Ah, yes. Fair point.

Travelling back to the past on a first time drinking herbs. It was out of curiosity.

Amanda made a face that gave me the impression that her system was on the brink of shutting down after taking a few sips of bitter herbal concoction.

I was more interested on replicating that impression than the potential reality of her system actually shutting down.

But Alas! My impression wasn't similar to hers. Bittersweet taste on the taste buds after a few sips. Impression on the system was that of taking a mild hot plunge, as opposed to a cold plunge.

What's my potential reality looking like right now? It could always go either way. Free will comes with a condition of unintended consequences.

Is it really fair that every action I take, I'm not fully in control of the outcome but whatever the outcome becomes, I'm fully responsible for it?

Amanda's impression stays with me. Her face when tasting bitterness brings me back to the news presenters discussing war's end.

Both expressions contain disbelief, a system processing something it wasn't designed to handle.
Hot plunge versus cold plunge.
War versus peace.
Traditional versus modern.
All dichotomies that collapse when you're staring at the ceiling, mind nearly blank.

Streetlights flicker through half-drawn blinds, casting geometric shadows across the ceiling.

Perhaps, it's nature's own abstract art installation. I wonder if the patterns mean something, like constellations telling ancient stories.

Funny how we fill our homes with machines that mimic natural phenomena.

Dreams hover just beyond my grasp, like memories of childhood hiding places.

I'm not fully here nor there, similar to that state between sleep and wakefulness where thoughts cascade without permission.

Amanda never understood this liminal space, preferring sharp boundaries between states of being. Her certainty about reality was both comforting and suffocating.

Free will tastes bittersweet on the taste buds of experience. I lay here wondering again, if my head feels heavy but my body feels light as a feather, where exactly am I located?

Music from the neighbor's apartment seeps through walls, uninvited but not unwelcome.

The melody carries emotions without the burden of language, unlike the precise words of news presenters trying to contain chaos in neat sentences.

I close my eyes and the ceiling disappears, replaced by synesthetic waves of sound drifting through my mind's eye.

It only took a few minutes until the kettle whistles, calling me back to this room, this body, this familiar stranger I call myself.


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