Unfinished:

He didn’t know how long he’d been floating, weightless. It could have been forever. It felt like forever. The colors churned outside in their lightness, and their boldness and the music vibrating through the metal and transparent enclosure surrounding him had lulled him into eternity. He thought perhaps he should look somewhere and see what time it was or what day or what century. He had a vague sense that inside this, whatever this was around him that the music hummed through so sweetly, that there had once been a clock, perhaps. A clock and lights maybe, and dials and screens, something to sit in, to lie in, and all the things that the colors and the music had made him forget as he floated in the middle of this box and even that he’d forgotten what a word such as time even meant. Even as he thought the word, he could feel it float out from him and disappear into the colors and the music outside.

The colors mingled in strands and fingers, combining and coming apart, and the music did the same. It rose and fell with the opening and closing of the thing outside he also couldn’t remember, the heart of all this floating color that sang music to him. It reminded him of a memory, a memory that must be so very, very old now…an instrument someone had once played to him, with these keys on which to put your hands and these levers on which to put your feet. If struck with determination, it would ring out so clearly as to fill up all the space around it like an empty hall or the sky itself and all the plains underneath it…or if played softly it would sound like it was a the faintest whisper in a dark cave. The music sounded like that, coming in waves of clarity and whisper, and it had been impossible to resist.

He’d been so tired, he’d just closed his eyes to listen to the music and pictured the gases outside dancing to such gentle music. He’d intended it to be only a moment. He was so tired. It had only been meant to be a moment…and now here he was, and now who was he? He remembered nothing. He was nothing. There was just the color and the music all around him, keeping him warm and safe from the cold outside the metal and the transparency.

“You can’t sleep here.”

He opened his eyes, or were they already open, and he felt as if the voice could have been inside his head; it had felt like that, but his eyes were telling him something else. A girl stood before him, her hands on her hips with her hair parted at her forehead with a strand hanging down loose from the rest. She hated it when it did that, he remembered. She brushed it aside and she shivered like it was cold and he saw some of the outside’s color wisp from her clothing. He blinked and rubbed her eyes and he saw for a moment that the color and music was her clothing and it was not just falling from it. It would move and dance if he looked at it closely for long enough.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Am I dreaming you?”

A wave of grief racked him as a clear note of the music outside rang out, and he remembered he had known her once, the cold girl shivering in the wisps of color. She’d been his, he’d thought, but he couldn’t remember how, or what that meant, or who she was. Just that she’d been his, and he’d lost her. They’d taken her from him. He couldn’t remember them either. He wished he could, but they were gone too.

“I’m sorry,” he said mournfully, and the shivering girl knew he meant it and that he’d forgotten why.

She floated towards him and he knew for sure that she couldn’t really be there and he then wondered if he was really where he really was and he wondered if such circular questions actually had a bottom to them like bottomless pits in which we throw stones into, listening for a skitter or a thud when they finally hit bottom. But she was close to him now and she laid her head down on his chest like she always used to do when she was cold. He felt how cold she was, cold to the bone, and he remembered that he was cold, too. So cold, and so very, very tired. He’d thought that the music and the colors had been keeping him warm and safe, but they’d only been keeping him company. He looked down and the shivering girl was looking up at him, he thought maybe now it was just her face and her voice that remained; the rest had shivered away back into the color and the music.

“You can’t sleep here,” she said. “You need to lay down.”

It seemed like such a silly notion, to lie down when one was already weightless. What would be the point?