A Glimpse into the In-Between
In the weeks when sleep began to feel lighter, he started to take an interest in the moments in between. Not in dreams in the usual sense, not in their images or their strange logic. It was something else that held him. A brief state in which the night was not yet over and wakefulness had not yet taken hold. A narrow space between two orders.
At first, he had barely noticed it. He had woken up, lain still in the dark, and for a few seconds had the feeling that the room was not simply a room. Nothing more. Not an event one would tell anyone about. And yet something of it remained. Not as an image, but as a tension. Since then, he sometimes listened into the night as if it were a room in which he somehow knew there had to be a second door. He spoke to no one about it. Not out of shame. More because he did not know what exactly one could say. That the wall behind the shelf felt farther away on some nights than it should. That the door beside the bed did not seem threatening, but not indifferent either. Sentences like that lose their force as soon as day touches them. So he kept them to himself.
One night, long after midnight, he woke again. No dream had thrown him out. No sound had come through the window. He was simply there, eyes open, in a room that at first looked entirely ordinary. The dim rectangle of the window. The darker shape of the wardrobe. A chair with clothes on it. The narrow strip of floor between the bed and the door. This time he did not lift his head at once. He stayed still and tried only to hold the moment. Perhaps that was exactly his mistake. The instant he noticed himself waiting, everything grew duller. The room withdrew into its usual shape. Things became merely things again. It was as if something had held its breath and hidden itself in the very moment it was noticed.
He closed his eyes, opened them again, and felt how quickly attention had turned into effort. Perhaps, he thought, that was the point at which things always began to fail. Not only here. Everywhere. The moment something truly touched him, something else in him began to hold on to it, examine it, arrange it. Almost every moment of wonder became a question in him, and almost every question became a quiet form of control. Perhaps control began much earlier than one believed. Perhaps in the very way one refused to simply let something happen.
He turned his head slightly and looked at the door. It was closed, as always. No light from the hallway. No sound behind it. And yet there was something off in its narrowness, as if it were not merely framed, but directed somewhere. It did not seem strange. Not hostile. More attentive than anything else. He noticed the urge rising in him to look more closely, to get up, to do something, anything, to put an end to the blur. In the same instant he felt that exactly there, again, was the same coarse movement. The old reflex of turning the unclear into something testable. He stayed where he was.
For a long time, nothing happened. Then it was not the door that changed, but the space around it. The wall no longer seemed fixed, but slightly displaced, as if behind its visible surface there were another one. The floor seemed to stretch almost imperceptibly. Not enough to frighten him. But enough to make every familiar proportion quietly unreliable. Even the darkness was different than usual. It was not empty. It had depth. He breathed more shallowly, not out of fear, but so as not to disturb anything.
The less he wanted, the clearer it became that the room was not simply there, but was answering in a certain way. Not to his words. Not even to his intention. More to his posture toward it. As if there were places that opened only to the person who did not immediately try to take possession of them. The thought struck him with unexpected force. For a moment he had the strange feeling that the room knew more about him than he did. Not about his name or his history, but about the way he approached things. How quickly he searched instead of waiting. How quickly he tried to understand instead of letting himself be touched. There was no accusation in it. Only a quiet precision.
And suddenly he sensed that this nocturnal attentiveness had something to do with the rest of life. No clear connection. Only a fine line running through both. Through the darkness of this room, and through those hours of the day in which he felt that something in him longed for truth without yet knowing in what form. The door remained closed. He saw no figure. Heard no voice. And yet it became clear to him that he had not only seen a boundary, but touched it. Not the boundary between sleep and waking. Another one. The boundary between a gaze that wants at once to make something out of the world, and a quieter form of presence in which the world itself begins to speak.
It lasted only a short while. Then the edges lost their displacement again. The wall returned to its place. The floor became once more the narrow strip of wood between the bed and the door. The door was only a door again. But something had shifted. He lay awake for a long time, without closing his eyes. Not because he hoped it would happen again. More because he sensed that hope was too crude a thing in matters like this. What had happened seemed to elude any coarse intention. And still it had left behind a clarity greater than the experience itself.
By morning he would hardly have been able to say what exactly had been different in the night. Perhaps the first daylight would make it all seem smaller. Perhaps he would doubt it. He knew that feeling. And yet, before he drifted back to sleep, he knew that something had begun in him that no longer fit entirely into the old order. Not because he had discovered something, but because for the first time he understood that some rooms do not answer because one enters them, but because one stops pressing against them.
