You wake up on the train and realize you're late. You were going to meet a friend here. You wake up on the train a few hours before the meeting with the friend, and start planning what you're going to talk about. She was going to tell you about an experience she'd had and you were going to reciprocate. But is that right? You wake up in bed and it is still dark out. You lay there for a while until you wake up again and it is still dark outside. There is someone in bed with you and you don't want to disturb them, so you don't look for your phone to check the time. Eventually you wake up again and it is slightly lighter outside, but the meeting is still looming large in your head. You wake up and get out of bed and go about your morning, eating breakfast, sending some emails. The friend hasn't responded to your texts. She probably forgot. The time of the appointment comes and goes, and an hour later she says yes, she had forgotten. After rescheduling for another day, you spend the rest of the day wasting all your time and feeling like shit about it. You watch a video that feels important at the time. Then another, that feels less important in the moment, then a few more, and then one that is more important than the first one, but you feel too bad to really register it. You take a photo of the screen and stash it away. You wake up enmeshed in the digital world of these videos, pinging between digital locations, watching as your disconnected player avatar cycles through the same rote animations. The world feels full of life, not in the buds-bursting-on-the-tree-branch way, but in the ghost-in-the-machine, more-than-meets-the-eye kind of way. Every wall and turn is vivid. Every character splayed out in time. You feel an encyclopedic knowledge of a tightly built world, and with less exertion than a thought you find yourself there, past-present-future. You wake up to the sun streaming in through the window. You are on the couch. You don't know where soot is, then you remember. The inside of your head feels twisty and useless. You try to compell yourself out the door, and after a pair of pants and some effort, you succeed. It is absolutely beautiful. There is thick ice on the ground, and snow on top of that, but you can feel hope in the breeze on your face. Your brain feels like it is still wired the same as the videos, so it feels like you are inside a different world that is also just a different angle on the normal one. You know in your body how beautiful it is. You turn around and head back inside, wishing you could walk more. You know that tomorrow will be a less beautiful day, and that you haven't squandered this one, but it feels like it. You wake up and stretch. Not like, arms-over-the-head-with-a-big-yawn stretch, but like taffy. Like ripping-but-refusing-to-rip. Like pulling yourself apart, but not exceeding the vessel of your skin. You wake up just as the train is pulling away. You feel a rising panic. You hope this isn't the stop you wanted to get off at.