A newborn afternoon

You emerge.
Silver light cut by curtains settles across this room in ribbons.
The faint sound of eyelids popping open, and you see it all with milky-blue newborn eyes.
Your arm is asleep under your head. You roll to your side and pick it up with your other hand. Heavy, the arm falls to the mattress and bounces like a stranger’s.
The things you see move like waves. Independently. You roll to sit -- it’s someone else’s body.
The sun is setting. How long have you been here?
It wasn’t like this before. Things have been changed. Moved around. Your skin doesn’t match your head.
You sleep. You wake.
Time to get ready, go go, get up. It’s always so hard to stand. So hard to lift the weights off eyelids, and fight. Fight gravity and the chill of the room outside the sheets. You stand; find clothes to wear. You pick them from a pile and lay them on the bed next to where you sit. You stand and totter drunkenly. You place a shirt over your head and pull it down around your torso. You step through pant legs and look into the mirror.
The face is grey.
The clothes are rumpled and wrong.
Just a few more minutes. A few more minutes of sleep, you think, and your body is bouncing to rest on the box springs.

You emerge.
The room is black. How long have you been here? You see the night sky through a gap in the curtain and the window glass. A break in the orange gas haze allows some pale scattered stars to show through.
You look around. Rub your face with sweaty, trembling hands. What was that pill you swallowed? Try to focus.
The colorful spray of light in your mind gestures.
You follow.

You emerge.
Bed. Wedged in sheets so long. But up now, up on your feet. When you stand you let gravity course through your stock and bury you in the ground, and grow here by your bedside. Grow thick in the sun. The ground is spinning plates. You sit. Look down at these soft musty folds of the sheets that open wide for you. This is the sunset warmth of your baby brother's birth.
Your young mother wakes, and raises the blanket for you to crawl in beside her. So you roll next to her warmth, and lay wrapped in the convincing scent of your dreams.
The love is so thick you see it.

You smile as you dream through your newborn afternoon. And dream, and dream, etcetera.