Ch.ase exhaled loudly, his determination to rise from his bed dissipating as rapidly as the flatulent air that escapes from a children’s balloon once the knot at its base is untied. He simply fell back into his pillow while hastily yanking up the blanket to cover his naked shoulders again.
This had nothing to do with slumber anymore. He was wide awake now, but suddenly plagued by the deep fear that he was in danger of losing his mind. Ch.ase started quivering at this thought despite the fact that he was straining hard to simply lie quiet and motionless on the mattress now, doing his utmost to stay calm and commanding every single voluntary muscle in his body to relax without further ado.
All without success, as it seemed.
Stifling a dark panic that he could feel bubbling forth within him, Ch.ase hastily covered his eyes with the crook of his arm, as if he could hide in this fashion, as he lay there stationary in the near total darkness that still prevailed. As incomprehensible as it seemed to him, the room was now rapidly filling to what felt like the bursting point with some strange gargantuan swell of avian noise. An immense chorus of chirping birds seemed to flood the world outside his window. Their twittering quickly filled his room and even his head with song. He wasn’t sure where they were, but these birds were presumably gathered somewhere just beyond the barely discernible boundaries of his still-gloomy bedroom, singing loudly and boldly to proclaim the onset of this brand-new day about to break.
After a short but oddly indeterminate period of time had elapsed, Ch.ase slowly lifted his arm, uncovering his eyes again. Still flat on his back and nearly unmoving, he cautiously opened them while struggling to lie as still and silent as he possibly could. From his vantage point, his still-sleepy vision was directed vertically upward, interrupted only by what might just as well have been a stubborn stratus layer of uniformly diffuse gray cloud. He continued looking upward as he allowed himself the luxury of a few additional seconds during which his head began to clear and his senses subsequently finished rebooting somewhat. As everything gradually came into focus, he found himself staring at the off-white plaster of a bedroom ceiling which was still shrouded in a state of semi-darkness.
He was completely motionless now but listening attentively. Despite his most concentrated attempts at achieving a state of total relaxation as he lay here, he knew deep within that he was too nervous to relax now. His entire body was still rigid with the same tension that had quickly seized possession of him when the birds had launched into song. Since that moment, and in just one single instant, he could sense how every solitary nerve in his body drew as taut as the horsehair on some vintage concert violinist’s bow. His arms and legs seemed to him to be locked so rigidly that he could neither command them to move nor could he actually get them to hold still. With his arms shivering ever so lightly then, Ch.ase felt as helpless as he reckoned a quadriplegic might in such a situation. A pronounced ache began making itself noticeable, arching upward through his shoulders and neck, spreading speedily into and across the back of his head. As he concentrated on taking another series of deep breaths, exhaling long and hard each time as though he were in labor giving birth to a nightmare, Ch.ase shut his eyes tightly again and continued to do his best at yet another attempt at relaxation. In between breaths, he reached for the tablets and opened the vial. He tapped two pills onto the palm of his left hand and swallowed them without water.
And, of course, all the while he could not stop listening.
By this time, however, he wasn’t really sure of what he was hearing anymore, as the rising tidal rush and roar of blood in his ears was actually just as deafening to him as the perceived chatter of the birds. It sounded to him like a fast-running stream gushing forth, circulating erratically and splashing wild foamy corpuscles through the countless tiny canyon-like channels that this river had eroded within the cavities of his skull.
Was this maybe the heavy metal version of tinnitus? Or was he only slowly but surely losing his mind? Maybe this was what the Big Eddy of nervous breakdowns felt like when it came on?
Slowly, though, he regained the upper hand and sensed himself capturing control of his body again. Ultimately, he succeeded in returning to a state of lying completely motionless on the bed. The shaking was done and over, things were going to be alright after all. He was doing his utmost to retain control over himself, determined to face down the last of the still recurring waves of tension that braced his body, albeit in diminishing cycles.
He lay there, just listening. Just closing his eyes.
Breathing in deeply.
Exhaling slowly, as though he were trying to blow out a candle that was a mile away.
In situations like this, he was often tempted to finally try some form of stronger meditation or perhaps astral traveling. He longed in such moments to possess the ability to simply sever all the bonds to his own body and self at will, straining hard to imagine what it would be like to allow his mind the luxury and the freedom to simply wander off–examining, for example, the prodigious assembly of colorful songbirds which he thought could be found gathered in the apex of a lush canopy of green foliage directly outside the open window of his bedroom.
He seldom got very far however. In fact, he usually tended to spend most of the time pondering whether it was even at all possible to succeed at astral traveling if one had to work as diligently at it as he was doing.
So, as a kind of diversion, he would in such moments regularly resort to considering how it happened that the birds always managed to get to their roosting place without his ever once having noticed their movements.
And, in a further exercise in distraction, he often tried imagining where they might have come from in the first place.
In his mind’s eye, he sometimes actually briefly succeeded in becoming a detached observer to this avian spectacle. He would find himself watching intently as they stealthily amassed in the last fleeting light of the evening, diminutive shadows that hustled silently and quickly to and fro, through the soft, blue-black velvet blackening sky hanging on the peripheral fringes of twilight.
This would be in those final few fluid minutes before the nocturnal sky assumed its deep impenetrable luster and all life, almost conspiratively, seemed to grind to an uneasy halt. An almost deafening whisper would make itself noticeable in the first minutes of darkness before it too subsided, nearly unnoticeably at first, just like the mist that follows on the heels of an afternoon tropical downpour so often does.
The birds would of course be resting during the night, perched high up in the uppermost branches of the trees, just as he, too, would be sleeping. But in truth, he suspected, these birds probably never really slept. They would instead be simply resting while collectively bearing mute witness to the constellations of the night, watching as the stars dotting the darkness of the heavens gradually revealed themselves and rotated patiently, bit by bit, to face the first soft hints of light spilling over the eastern horizon each morning. This grand assembly of birds formed a stoical congregation that united nightly in body and spirit, anticipating with a firm and quiet certainty the first tentative scattering of dawn that would soon yield to another day.
A new day.
Of course, Ch.ase couldn’t be absolutely certain, but he did actually suspect that birds were probably pretty stupid creatures. Back when he was a kid, he recalled having seen various depictions of their skulls and skeletons being directly correlated to those of a number of long-extinct dinosaurs, the implication being that this was irrefutable evidence that they were direct descendants of the great lizards. And obviously the knowledge that dinosaurs had the neurological equivalent of peanuts for brains certainly wasn’t restricted only to some elite handful of paleontologists. So Ch.ase reasoned that, to these birds, any new day would most likely be a day pretty much like yesterday. They might find themselves pecking for worms in the pouring rain again, pooping off high tension wires all day long or simply fretting about how to judiciously avoid being eaten by cats while going about their daily business.
Eating, crapping and minding the food chain.
Day in and day out.
But to Ch.ase and all the other civilized beings on this worldmonde.Planet, matters were somewhat more complicated than this. Admittedly, there