The weekend was full of attacks, I lost track of how many or how long or what I ate or what I did. I slightly overdosed on painkillers, but the relief they brought was like white squares on an infinite, mazelike and ancient checker board floor. I didn’t leave the house, I didn’t leave my bed, I began to have vast fever dreams of dusty and cavernous hallways, intricately recursive ship corridors. The dryness of it all, the aching, from somewhere deep within me. What does it mean?
And then today there were no mere attacks, I feel myself rising, as if I had just leapt into a swimming pool. I met Dominic after work.
“I feel like the pattern is right there, but I can’t find it,” I said. “I can’t see what it is that governs the ebb and flow. I spend so much time thinking about it, trying to see the patterns within my life, but I can’t.”
“Patterns never resolve until viewed at the right resolution. If you’re too close or too far away you’ll never see the real picture.”
“I know, but how can I vary how closely I look at my own life? How do you zoom out?”
“How do you know you need to zoom out?”
“Because I can’t need to zoom in any further, there’s no further level to zoom to. The way I view my life is already at the most minute level, at the highest level of scrutiny possible. I see every grain of detail available. I must need to get further away, that’s the only possible answer. That I need to distance myself from my own life, somehow.”
Dominic blinked two or three times in rapid succession, as if I’d just screamed at him.
“Maybe you need to fall in love,” he said.
