How do you feel today?

I’m standing in his house, and I see him open his eyes as he lies in his bed still. His breathing hitches lightly, almost inaudible but still heard in the quietude. He looks around and sees a sleeping body, so close yet so far from him. He lays his hand on it: its chest rises and falls, its hands remain still on its sides, and its form, slanted from being intertwined with his legs, faces the other side. I watch him from below, slowly witnessing his established patterns, the ones that have already formed after a series of continuity, slightly change, enough for a difference to appear; for the lines, drawn connected to each other, to deter and break.

Even if his eyes are open, he is still not awake. He moves in and out of the present, teleporting between two worlds back and forth, until he sits down on the bed and bows his head down. The body has long walked away, a busy one as it roams around the house to complete itself for the day, and he, our nameless young man, still gazes on the floor, detached from his own world. He looks up when the body approaches him, but he isn’t there. He’s everywhere but there.

So, he comes down and prepares himself a light breakfast: a cup of hot tea, a bowl of cereal, and himself, snacking on his meal, alone. He hears noises, but he is on his own. He then escapes and finds himself in a labyrinth where the only way out is to discover himself and understand what he’s looking for. Is he even looking for something?

I’m not sure, as I look at him stare at his bowl of cereal, his hand frozen around the silver spoon. He must be scouting for the exit sign in his maze, filled with sterile light and towering panels. The landscape appears cold with the hint of green and blue in the white glow, and there in his white clothes, the young man searches for his way out, running into questions on floating bubbles that hold the pass that let the panels slide open.

One of the questions, the hardest for him, is how he feels today, at the hour.

His feet, planted on the cold floor, stay still as his gaze holds its place. How does he feel today? Misunderstood, unloved, unattended? Content, satisfied, settled? Longing, wanting, needing? He tries to find the answer, and while he does, he moves back to the present as the body talks in the kitchen where he’s eating alone.

He stares at it, standing by the door, and shakes himself from his stupor. He picks up his bowl and mug and leaves them in the sink unwashed. He puts on his clothes and shoes, and he’s ready to go, carrying the fog in his mind that has now filtered through his own body. As he sits in the car, on his way to work, the ride feels autonomous, as if he were in a self-driving car. He looks outside, and the landscape is gray, worse than the labyrinth he was just in a while ago.

As the car moves forward, rushing to its location with the body’s hands on the steering wheel, the young man steps back into his fiction, the world he built with his mind, returning to answer a question that sounds so easy on his tongue: how do you feel today? He realizes, unfortunately, that he doesn’t know. What he feels, however, he can describe: a body in a borrowed vessel, floating in the wind with the arms spread open and eyes closed, falling infinitely, waiting, hoping. For what, I ask myself, I’m not sure. None of us do.