A short story called "Inside the Room, Sitting in front of the Computer"

Inside the Room, Sitting in front of the Computer

He was looking at a desk, and on it was a laptop computer surrounded by books and folders and paper, and so it was very cluttered. His vision felt very cluttered. He thought about the fact that his vision is always cluttered and the fact that there is always something you don’t see, there’s so much going on in every shot and you don’t always see half of it and that’s really disappointing, maybe. Is it? There was also a lamp diagonally to his right, just in his peripheral vision, but as he thought about it he looked at it and it was quite big and it was very metallic – quite shiny – and there was light coming out of its bell-shaped end which shined on the wall, and now he was staring at the wall which, when you looked closely, had lots of lumps on it. A whole lot of lumps. Millions of them when he zoomed his gaze out and looked at the portrait above the computer. It was a woman. It was a very weird painting. Very unrealistic. There was no woman there though. Just a painting. Just some paint inside a frame in the vague appearance of a woman. What did it mean? What did it want, with its vacant, black-eyed stare? Nothing. It wanted nothing because it was a painting made of paint painted by a painter. It was just a whole lot of lumps like the wall. It was a solidified mess of paint. Paint that used to be drippy and liquid was now smeared all over the wall and was really lumpy and he was looking at it, and now he looked around the room conscious of the fact that he was looking at the wall, imagining what people would think of him looking at the wall, so now he was looking at the printer behind him, and the open door behind that which led into the hallway, which led into the rest of the house. That made him think of going to the kitchen to get something to eat, but he resisted the temptation. Even though he was very tempted. And although there was nothing there he wanted, and though he knew that very well because he checked only about half an hour ago (or something like that because time doesn’t seem linear on these sitting-alone days, it drags and accelerates and then just drags and it’s just you and your body and your mind ticking along and everything else is still) he still really wanted to go down there and find some sort of morsel. A biscuit maybe, or a banana, or a muesli bar. Or maybe he would make himself some cereal even though he had already had it this morning.

Maybe. That was the word of the day, he thought to himself, and he thought about the fact that he was really deep for thinking that. And he thought about what other people would think of him for thinking that, and he thought about some people that he knew and what he was going to say to them the next time he had a conversation with them. And he distracted himself with these thoughts, fleeting and flying around his head like flies. Everything was flying around inside his head like flies, there was so much in there, even though there wasn’t. Because he was thinking about the fact that there was so much flying around in his head as well as the fact that it was just a lump of pink stuff with electrical signals. And it was hard to fathom that, because then you’d be working out the fragility, the substance, the reality of something you were using to do that, and it didn’t really make much sense but neither did anything. But that was useful because he now felt like he’d reached a happy conclusion on his word of the day being Maybe. There was a lot of maybe today, as there was in every day, and he really liked the word Maybe. He said it aloud now because there was no one home and he liked talking to himself, weird as that may seem to the onlookers that he imagined watching him in some sort of third-person video. It was weird he thought now to think about that, considering the fact that no one was ever going to watch what he was doing right now – or care – and neither was he, but he would love to see himself in the third-person because he never got to do that, and all at once that thought made him realise that he was always going to see the world through a first-person perspective. That he was alone. That was weird. That he was never going to actually empathise with anyone, in the whole entire fucking world, because he couldn’t see the world as they did, and have the mind that they do, and think the things that they do, and have the first-person camera eyes seeing him as they do.

“Maybe” he whispered to the air inside the room as he took another look around, and again thought about the fact that he was taking another look around. “Maybe I think too much”, he said to no one. And no one was listening and again he was thinking and it was annoying. And just when his mind returned to the knowledge that he had to do more study for the exams; just when he realised that he would have to sit down and write for hours; just when he realised that there would be some really stressful exams in a few weeks; just when he realised that writing this story was stupid, he began to notice the clicking of his fingers on the keys on the keyboard of the laptop on which he was writing, and he began to think about the fact that the story he was writing was coming to a conclusion, and he began to wonder whether it was good, and it was a very uncertain thing, as was everything, and he was alone, and he was thinking about his friend who was going to read it and he was wondering whether he would like it, and now he thought it would be a good time to stop typing and after these next few words he does.