A Great and Perfectly Cyclical Machine

To escape it he slides his head carefully beneath his blankets and gazes up at the canopy he has formed above him. He curls his toes, his hands grazing the soft soles of his feet. His chin can feel the platform his knee caps have formed. Every extremity, once so separate, is now part of some tangible whole. The darkness is enveloping him, he can feel its caress overwhelm him. It is gentle but it must also be dangerous. There are no ominous shadows lurking, no intangible forces seeming to threaten his very existence. But there is the silence, a great and perfectly cyclical machine.

At first it is slow. The vacuum makes every noise inside this microcosm an amplification. Every sound outside is unwelcome, therefore unheard. The silence is first quiet, momentumless, infantile in simplicity. And then the phantasmagoria of his thoughts seems to fill the void created by the immense absence of sound. In his mind a thought flickers. Then dies. A new one is born. And more and more are borne. Thoughts devoid of meaning. Disjointed and sudden and inexplicable and frightening. And then they coalesce into disturbing tunes, franticly playing, incessantly dancing through his world. Inside he thinks his mind is dying, sure of his own suffocation, and desperately wonders about air. Where is all the air?

But then he relaxes his tense muscles a little. The thoughts are slowing down, the heartbeats less rapid, breaths relaxed like a baby's. It feels soft again inside. He can hear only physicality- muffled pulse, calm inhale, the tiny whispers of his occasional breaths. He hears something like a chant, a rhythm, a beat very simple and deep. But slowly this, too, begins to cease until there is no more sound- no movement and no touch.