At home: Motionless

I am at home, the whiteness of the walls start to weigh heavy on my chest. I decide to leave but my feet refuse to obey my mind’s orders. My body is numb. Nothing moves inside me. Maybe that’s what happens when we die. Our consciousness is still alive, some people call it soul, but our body no longer responds. Am I dead? I want to move my hand to remove the doubt, but my body remains stiff, unresponsive. Am I rehearsing the moment of my death and relishing it? Even my eyes stopped moving. You know someone is dead when you look in their eyes. You cannot mistake that emptiness that looks back at you. The whiteness of the wall filled my eyes with void. They just stare without seeing. Whiteness, rather than blackness, is void. I used to wonder what blind people see. I imagine that inside them, behind those outer eyes, there are other eyes, thousands of other seeing eyes, eyes of a whole audience, staring at a theater’s curtain that never opens. I always had this image until one day a blind guy was asked this question on TV. What do you see? he was strangely faced with answering. He said: I don’t know what ‘seeing’ means. But I thought: what does ‘not seeing’ mean? Now, I am the blind. I freak out. I want to see. I shake off the numbness in my eyes and I look. Everything around me starts to feel alive. The old radio by my side is about to jump up and start walking around the room. I can almost see it floating at the level of my eyes and say: enough of that crap. The green plant at the far end of the room is moving its leaves. Is it dancing? The small useless decorations are loosely roaming in the air. The room is no longer empty. I am no longer alone. The ground is slowly moving. It is circling around me clockwise. The painting on the wall behind me is suddenly in front of me. The people in it start jumping out and filling the room. Suddenly, I hear music, and couples start embracing and dancing. One couple has stumbled on my plant. Where am I? The whiteness is fading. The room is gradually being filled with colors, as if someone is painting the scene at that right moment. I am part of the scene. I am part of the crowd. No, I am the tip of a painter’s stroke, a marginal persona in the background. I jump and without thinking, I open the door and slam it behind me.