CADO [DISCONTINUED]

(1 - The Stranger)

    My head is like the paper in a printing press: words and pictures impress themselves into my thoughts. Voices without faces and faces without voices, disembodied and disfigured. Ghosts of people I should know pull themselves together, piece by piece, but a clear image fails to form before I begin to feel the cold floor beneath my back. The chill runs down my spine and through the air in my lungs. It strikes bone deep before I can even recognize its presence.

I simply exist. But I do exist. Somehow.

    My hand twitches, trying to feel the ground beneath me. It's dirty, grimy, and flat. Tile? I try to pry my eyes open, but they refuse to open more than a crack. For a minute, they struggle to adjust, but they give in to the darkness again. My head hurts. I wait for it to stop hurting. My limbs are lead. I wait for them to move.

    Minutes pass without being counted. Time feels loose and janky, but the floor beneath me feels solid, and so do I. As I lay here, waiting for something - anything - I begin to think. In thinking, I realize that I'm struggling to find anything to think about. Words don't form anymore. It's all just concepts and consciousness, recognition and awareness. Something may be wrong with me. Something is wrong with me. It will have to wait. So it waits.

Only now do I notice the buzz of fluorescent lights. I pause to listen. A dying radio screams out white noise. Above this, I hear the whir of freezers and refrigerators, years past their last inspection. Piece by piece, the sounds of my new environment build. Murmuring machines, whistling winds, buzzing lights, and my own quiet breaths come together to form a shaky picture that makes little to no sense.

I need to get up.

I force my eyes to open again. It hurts, but this time, I hold the line, bearing through the pain and waiting as they adjust. The light stabs at my eyes. I stare back. I blink away the seconds and minutes. My sight gradually adjusts, and a drop ceiling comes into focus. Its cheap panels are speckled in colors far too dull to recognize.

Two black masses fill the corners of my vision. I turn my head to the right. There, a metal shelf sticks out of the ground. Wrappers in various states of disarray litter the beige, tile floor. They once may have been colorful and exciting, but whatever secrets they held are gone, half-eaten, or smashed beyond repair. I roll my head to the left, only to see another empty shelf. A honey bun rests directly on the floor, not even a wrapper to guard it from the ground. It is the facade of innocence; despite its position, or the state of the place around it, it seems untouched by both time and nature. I wouldn't dare touch that thing.

    I let my head roll back to the middle, so I end up staring at the drop ceiling once more. It's the same type that capped the halls and classrooms of every school I've ever attended. Those ceilings suffered: teenage boys threw pencils at them until the graphite tip stuck, water damage gave their lighter tones a yellowish tint, and in one place in time, I can barely remember a muddy footprint appearing on one, high above the reach of mankind. But I also remember an office, and I remember spending hours at a computer under fluorescent lights much like these. Who was I? When did that normality stop and this bizarre situation begin?