Harlequin

I don’t know what time it is, but I know I’ve been tossing and turning around for at least an hour now.

I crawl out, switch on the light of the dresser and look at my reflection.

It illuminates me like a spotlight, separating me from the darkness of my stage, my room.

My studded earrings shine as they catch the light. I realise I had forgotten to take them off.

I look away and reach out to fetch my hairbrush from the cabinet and I put it through my hair and look back at myself again, and –

But I’m not there anymore.

I can see the freckled walls with the framed photographs, the curtains, drawn. My table, as it is.

Nothing changed, except me.

As if I simply ceased to exist.

I move back and forth, still not completely able to comprehend what’s going on. I feel a little dizzy. I keep looking away and looking back, commanding my image to form in a world where I don’t belong, so that I can blame it on my head again and move on.

But it doesn’t.

I try to focus, and the image shifts. The darkness of the room is replaced by a flash of white light that blinds me, and once I regain my composure, I see a million colours drifting into each other, materialising into something, the materialism of which is questionable.

I find myself there, vaguely but I’m not sure it’s me, for I’m a harlequin silhouette, shifting, changing, blending into each other as I blink each time.

I stand out against the background which is simple, dark, peaceful, nothingness.

Somehow I’m fascinated and scared of myself, or what I seem to have become, at the same time.

The rest of the world seems dead, dark, silent, while I am at full brightness.

I try to listen to the silence, and it speaks to me.

Who am I?

Do I need to identify with the image I see every time I look in the mirror?

Am I just a combination of a pair of hands and legs and eyes and more?

Or am I a shining, glowing, reflecting blend of colours symbolising the different depths of me that I didn’t know existed?

My moods, my thoughts, my feelings, each new person that I become with every passing moment.

Am I just a consequence of who I used to be?

Do I need a concrete physical form to be who I am?

Maybe, I am something more.

Something way more surreal, something way beyond the understanding of you and me and everyone else.

I am the indefinable, that chooses to persist through passing glimpses, and resides for a while in skin and bone.

I am existence.

For without me, everything else is mere oblivion and there is no nothingness once the nothingness is me.

I find myself sitting on the floor under the shower, my clothes are soaked. The water is cold. I don’t know how I got here.

I look into the mirror, my eyes are red and rather swollen. The glowing green letters of the digital clock tell me it’s 4 AM.

I should probably get some sleep.