the choices you make

the clouds were such that they made the sky seem planar. the way they floated, heavy and light at the same time, gave the pale blue behind them borders and rendered it reachable; as in if you only had an arm long enough you could have reached out and actually felt it in your fingertips like a piece of fabric or a sheet of metal. F saw the sky curving over her head like it would have been a lid of a jar she had been contained in; and for a brief second she felt claustrophobic.


the morning was bright and clear, overly so. had that morning played the role of any other morning it would have made F uncomfortable; but today, as the nauseating brightness and cruel clarity were the characteristics of this specific one, they seemed to be very much in place. this was, after all, the morning, the defining one, a morning like no other; before this A.M. she had never been like she would be by the time the clock would strike noon. 


F made her way through the still sluggish town, slowly but unable to completely stop the rhythm of her steps. every corner, every crack, all the materials of the surfaces around her seemed to have much more detail than they normally did. or maybe she just paid more attention, tried to grasp the last moments as her old self as fully as she was able to before she would leave it behind for good. would the pavement feel the same under her feet in the afternoon as it did now? would the steepness of the stairs leading up to the museum she so liked spending time in burn in her legs in the same way? and how about the air, would it smell the same, would the feel of last night's rain on her skin still be her favourite thing in the world?


it was impossible to know; so F tried to remember it all, seal every single notion within her memory so that when she would emerge as the new her, she would have them to remind her of how she once was. she wouldn't be the same anymore, of course not, but maybe she could have this --  the memory traces to tie her into the reality that once was so that she wouldn't drift off to nothingness.


and at the same time F knew that it was in vain, all her effort to store the last fleeting moments of her current reality. she may have refused to admit it but she was very well aware that memories didn't exist in a container outside herself; and at the moment she would leave her old self behind she would do so to the perception of her past as well, and everything she would remember as the new F would be seen through the eyes of her. then this -- all of this -- would be gone.


and the only thing that would stop her from floating into space would be the planar sky cast over her head; and as she reached for the handle to open the door to the awaiting P.M. all she could do was to hope that it would be enough.