haze IV

He peeked into the room, to see her tucked up in several blankets on the bed, scrolling down some site on her laptop. The blinds were closed, but only just enough to let a number of hazy dots of sunlight, obstructed by the moving branches of a tree outside her window, dance around the room, and, when the wind would stop blowing, hang on walls motionlessly like drops of some lurid liquid. Everything seemed pretty serene. "No need to stick to the door frame, come in," she said, still looking at the screen. He didn't move. "How very formal. For your information, I find this posture rather comfortable, and the view from here is almost pre-raphaelite." He knew she was probably smiling, even though he couldn't see her face. Sensing that the wind had somewhat changed, he parted ways with the frame, waltzed over to the bed and sat down on the side, hands in pockets. She glanced over to him briefly and resumed swiping the touchpad upwards.

"You're destroying the elaborate composition of folds and drapes right now. They were molded after that Laokoon group cloth, if you care to notice." A slight smirk rushed across his face. "I said pre-raphaelite, not a century before Christ," he replied. "Well, the pre-raphaelites were inspired by a whole bunch of renaissance people, and the renaissance people were inspired by the Romans and the Greeks. You lose." "Fine, "he said, smiling faintly and stroking a pillow with a fuzzy cover. "I lose." They sat in silence for a while, she- typing up a few replies to someone, he- watching her fingers with their formerly bitten nails and dry skin gently, but quickly tap the keyboard. "Do I sense a change of mind?" he asked finally, looking up, and she looked up, too, noticing that his face and neck were dotted with the bright spots the blinds had created all over the room, and where the sunlight hit his black hair, the reflections were  a surprising dark red, instead of blueish grey, as she'd expected. "What do you mean?" she asked as innocently as possible, knowing the very moment she opened her mouth that she only asked because that was just what you did, when a conversation was inbound you were not sure you were ready to have, and that he knew, either.

He studied her, waiting for a reply. "Well, I have recently come to the conclusion that it doesn't make a lot of sense - being stuck," she finally said, exhaling and curling her lip like a child who had lost a staring contest, and then turned back to her laptop. He looked amused. "Elaborate, please?" She shrugged. "There's very little to elaborate on,“ she said, typing again, „I guess my suppressed pragmatic side showed itself for once. If you don't think you can die just yet, your life will suck more if you wallow in how it sucks. So I decided to start doing things. That's about it." His smile grew a bit bigger. "You didn't know that before?" She turned to him, with an expression he could not quite determine - it seemed delighted and bitter at the same time, rushing across her face like late afternoon sun across a tile roof of some small suburban house some place far away. "You really believe that's how it works?" she asked. "No."She stretched her arms and shoulders out from under her blanket and sighed. "No matter how you twist and turn it, there will always be moments when I'll feel miserable, when I'll be trying really hard and still failing, when things won't seem worth it but I will still be here. Dwelling on the bullshit is just painfully unproductive. I don't think I could stand it anymore, that's it."

She eyed him suspiciously. "Can we drop this patronising expression, please, will ya?" He did not answer, but she felt like those few seconds of his gaze she met told her a million stories and jokes, the history of the world in the speed of light, before he turned his head and looked around the room. The light spots and tiny particles in the air seemed to set the entire room in motion. "Look at all this dust. Do you never dust in here?" he said with the same knowing look on his face. She mustered him. "Why do you always make me feel like you know something I don't? Like your mind's preoccupied with greater matters of the universe, while me and the other mortals just try to get by on planet Earth?" He turned back to her and suddenly, she was plain vertigo, the flares in the room spinning quicker and the room blurring and growing luminous like a forest glade from John Everett Millais' most desperate dreams . "I'm just visiting," he either said, or thought, or maybe she was just imagining because after that everything turned a mellow, scintillating green, and then black.