yearning at the bottom of a well.

It’s classic film noir, her face is half-lit in the shadows.

It seems easy for me, she thinks, to suppress my unwanted memories during the daytime. In the haze of a distorted hour she clings onto some kind of hope, only to realize that the dust also rises and takes shape again. The eerily familiar strangeness comes back to haunt her when the night falls. She remembers, It isn’t so much as living as it is existing nocturnally; I do it on the best terms I can.

Her eyes are closed. Her soul is blinking restlessly, relentlessly. Her fingers search through the darkness for her night-vision spectacles. She sleeptalks, When I have those forbidden gems in my possession—or when I am possessed by those forbidden gems—either way, I will then be able to discern what tangibly exists in mon âme noire…

But this dark mysterious stranger, she fantasizes, He has taken them away from me and locked them inside a safe. Could it be? Is he trying to tell me that my reality must be viewed slanted so I may continue drifting freely in my transient existence? Oh yes, he’s testing my spine! He’ll whisper in my ear, My baby’s got the bends. And I’ll feel that my spine is already bent even before being blinded by his spaceship-high member that glistens ever so lustrously in the moonlight. I’ll proceed to tell him I’ve missed him terribly even though I’ve only felt him in my dreams. I’ll keep my soul intact— yet my lips will part and my uneven breathing will elude me, becoming hard— expectant.

::Wake up from Freudian dream-whirled::

In order for her to unlock the safe, she must find the original key that she carelessly dropped into the black pool of her heart. The stranger says, There will be blood. You will have to tread in the pool of your own blood until you find the key.

Meanwhile, the passage of time seeps though her fingers.

My fingers— where someone else’s heartbeats are imprisoned, displaced.