Night Corridor

The night is absolute. The vast plunging in temperature of the past week has led to a similar feeling of plunging in other ways too. These days feel as if they are lived underwater, at the bottom of some deep black pool perhaps, some uncharted darkly enchanted sea. I sit in the circle of lamplight that falls on my bed, and outside that circle (and inside the circle everything is hazy and unfocussed) my room seems a vast and uncharted region of sharp shadows and dark angles. The blue light of my stereo seems a continent away. My door, with the coat hanging on the back of it I haven't worn for years, seems another time entirely.
I daren't even think of the corridor outside.

At Em's earlier on, waiting for the kettle to boil, I stood in the coldness of her kitchen. Through the balcony window I watched the street. No-one passed by, and in those pre-twilight minutes, the pavement slick with rain, the reflection of the hotel sign (no vacancies) in that rain, everything seemed old and ancient, as if the moment were being remembered decades ahead.

I could reach forward with my left hand. Well, to the side really, and touch the glass of the window of my room. I would have to draw back the rubbery curtains first though. Why would I do it? It would be like touching a skin... No, not a skin, but some demarcation point between inside and outside. On nights like this, they seem absolutely opposed factions, matter and anti-matter, and if I opened the window, and breathe in the outside, I'm sure I wouldn't taste but a fraction. Night beyond our perception, colours we can't see...

I draw back the curtains, look out. I see the bathroom-angles of the house across the locked passage. I see the beige head of the lamp on the street. Vague and sharp angles of another house in the gap between buildings. I see the windows of this room are open.
Unknowingly, I have been breathing that impossible night-air.
The corridor outside shifts, shuffles off its skin of brick and stones.
It has been in here all the time.