A Fictional Snippet
Her eyes glazed over, and she felt her mind slipping. The spell of boredom had been cast.
The aching numbness began in her field of vision. Things blurred, shapes came out of the wall, morphing and merging like the continent Pangea floating apart. Shadows shifted into light and sighed, slumping back into darkness. She tried to wiggle her foot, but it wasn’t there. Her fingers were on autopilot– tracing the clicks of the keyboard, her mouse idly circling the screen like lazy fruitfly. She craned and arched the base of her neck as she silently, calmly, stepped out of her body.
The feeling in what was supposed to be her foot came back– not that it mattered, she thought bemusedly. Ghost-like doesn’t describe this state, she had decided — this cloud of consciousness was much more powerful as it was less tangible. While movement was like wading through molasses, passing through people gave a powerful lightning-spark of realities. As she studied her own, now-vapid face, she noticed small asymmetries and made a note to crunch her left cheek higher whenever she smiled. Mirrors were much less accurate than people realize, she thought.
The state of her current existence unfurled and flexed like a tea-leaf blossoming in hot water, and she readjusted herself and began sliding down the aisle, searching and hunting for her treasures as she merged and remerged into foreign thoughts and realities. By extending part of her — soul? she wondered– into her oblivious colleages, classmates, peers, she could literally read their minds. She discovered that depending on the emotion she focused on, certain memories and thoughts sifted up from their subconsciousness and revealed themselves, bare, truthful, and naked. Memories of betrayal were deliciously heavy, as if the worries and anxiety gathered thickly like moss on a damp stone. Revelations of love varied with pinpricks of passion and sometimes, she found strange scars of emptiness and despair that were like tiny black holes gouged out by a person’s own emotional intensities and lost attachments. Heaviness decorated the angst of revenge and resentment like unwieldy war medals, clanking against each other violently as she reached deeper to catch them and drag them out. These were what she had been seeking. She ran her mind across these dark anvils greedily, groping the nuanced surfaces for weaknesses as she read the person’s layers of resentment, despair, insecurities, briefly reliving memories (a violent sting of his slap; salty hot tears searing my cheek; her stomach lurches as he closes the door behind him ) with the thrill of transgression…..