Shades of Blue

Rubato

Time had simply stopped. Bent outward and bloated, each millisecond drawn out into a thousand painfully long moments, impossibly long and endlessly crawling on and into nothing.

Under the deep fog of storm-filled nights and half remembered wishes, in the space between deep breaths and the few seconds of earliest unconsciousness, only a few vague feelings and inclinations could break through the heaviness. Pain, primarily—an old ache that turned stabbing at seemingly random intervals, but never sharp enough to dredge up more than a dozen seconds of weak awareness before the numb cold crept back in. Despair often followed it, a weight dragging everything down to the bottom of this flowing river, drowning everything in its current.

But sometimes, it wasn't only the pain and suffering. Sometimes, other feelings bubbled up and boiled over, overwhelming the blankness with their intensity. They were no simple feelings—they were tangles in and of themselves, knotted up things that tore at him just as sharply as the stabbing pains.

There was some...restlessness. A need to wake, to fight the current and resist the desire to sink into its nothingness. Threads of desperation, a frantic something which pushed him along the river of heavy numb and dragging pain, forced him onward and upward, or at least told him that he ought to move onward and upward.

In rare moments of clarity, he could grasp onto the sensation that he was...searching for something...someone...that he was somewhere he was not meant to be, and he had to...find his way out of this, before...before something worse than this hell could happen.

When that need to find rose over the heaviness, it always pushed him onward for quite some time (if he could perceive time's passing, anyway). It came on suddenly and persisted until he did something. The urgency, the panic would rise up in him and he would find himself frantic, wherever—whenever—he was, and he would fight and claw his way out from under the numbness and into the terrifying, blinding unknown.

The unknown, as it turned out, was an empty space. A void of color and fog and absence. Dim, static, and empty. No discernable walls or sources of light, no sound, no people or objects to help him sort out where he was or what had put him here. Just him, in this wide, gaping indeterminate space, too dark to be comforting and too light to be resting.

When he managed to remember himself enough to know there was a self to remember, he always found himself there. Not knowing how he had come to be there, or anything about himself that might have helped answer the question and having no means to remember. Painfully alone and knowing that he had to free himself somehow. Knowing that he had to get out, and yet he couldn't.

He was trapped here. And he could not, no matter how he fought, escape this prison. He could not leave this place.

Oftentimes, this would be enough to send him sinking back into the nothing. The despair came as quickly as the desperation which preceded it all, and when the space around him was echoing in its silence, he would have no choice but to fall back under oblivion's hold.

And under that heavy hold, it would all soon be forgotten, wiped away, leaving him blank; until the desperation came back, and he scrambled up for air, and the cycle restarted.

There were sometimes fragments of what had surely come before. Little broken things, a half phrase in a voice that calmed him as much as it wounded him in its brevity, the sensation of wind in his hair or snowflakes in his hands, a blurry, blonde-haired person, and the feeling that he should have done more. Regret always came, when he managed to remember. It came, and it dragged him down, wiping itself away in the blur of nothingness.

But most of the time, it was the yearning that came to him. Like a string tied to something so far away that he had no hope of finding its end, and yet still pulling at him, urging him somewhere he couldn't see. Or a voice off somewhere distant, calling to him, even when he couldn't hear the words it said.