Escape Hatch

I entered the room, the lights were off. I turned on the LED strip I had installed in the false ceiling towards the door—it was set to blue, walked over to my cupboard, took the cigarettes out from its drawer, walked further in towards the bed, switched the lamp I had found that hilariously looked a lot like the lamp from the Pixar intro on over to a sharp neon red; woke up my laptop, turned on the studio monitors, played some music—The Paper Kites; back over to the bed, on the edge—right in front of my bookshelf, window slid open to my left; I did not need eyes to perform that sequence of movements, it was like breathing. The mint popped, the cigarette was lit; I pulled the coffee cup I had got my dad as a birthday gift that I was then using as an ashtray closer towards me, breathed in deep and exhaled as I fixed my gaze further off outside the window, towards the building right in front of mine that never made itself visible apart from laundry time every morning, and towards the one on its right—a bit bigger, with a grass courtyard and a lot of glass, a building that seemed made for someone’s purpose, from where I would occasionally hear the hum of loud parties and terrible music. The smell of smoke filled the room, and clouded my mind into a contained, collected mass I could set aside, behind electric guitars drowned in near-perfect reverb that supported a voice soft enough to cut through to me like the sonic representation of the cushion I had carefully curated my room to be. A little further ahead to the left of the window, outside my building—the street that housed people that, after over a decade of living near them, were more alien to me than the people I hadn’t seen or heard, who listened to my music in countries I didn’t know existed. I instinctively stood up and stretched my hand above the bookshelf, to open the tightly jammed wooden doors of the small shelf above it and take out the vodka I kept inside, poured it in the single shot glass that sat next to Bukowski, let it slip down my throat next to the smoke, and waited for it to inch back up to my head. Meanwhile, Sam sang without his drummer, I wanted him back; I needed the layers contained behind dynamic, predictable movement; I changed the track. The smoke in the room thickened, and I started feeling lighter; floating but grounded, alive; cloudy with a chance of pungent tobacco; unlike what I assume the charcoal that sat at the bottom of my cupboard would have been like—no smoke, no smell; just intoxicated air that would, along with the wine I had picked out to sit beside it, lift me up and lull me to sleep; a permanent nothingness, if I ever wanted it—an escape hatch from this submarine of sensations that seeped in through my ears and took over my veins; which was itself an escape hatch from the pitch black that seemed to have no rhythm.