I drifted in and out of consciousness, mind wandering the empty halls of my brain, opening up different doors, ideas being briefly considered, ideas like cats, and cat toys, and, even more cats, God why do I think about cats so much when I’m tired? Nevermind, that isn’t the point, the point is is that my body is trying to tell my mind to go back to sleep. My mind then closes whatever door about cats, once again, why, it had been wondering though, the idea being stored away for later, and starts on its way back down the hall, but not before it opens another door, usually about cats, and the process starts again.
This continued until my mind decided that it was going to do what it wanted, and walked all the way through a door ignoring my body’s desperate pleas to go back to sleep. The once observed idea, which wasn’t for once about cats, thank God, now coming into focus sharply in my brain.
Where was I? My body soon followed my mind’s questioning, this didn’t feel like my bed, no, my bed had too much cat hair to be this sterile. I could feel the cold radiating from the ground I was laying on seeping into my body, there was no soft blanket covering my body, or any cats, keeping the cold at bay, I could feel something else over my body though. It kept me from moving, stripping my body of freewill in its lazy state, that got my body going. Did one of cats drag that mess of yarn over me again? If so, they were not getting any wet food today.
I was suddenly wide awake, staring at what was most definitely, not, my bedroom. In fact, I wasn’t even inside at all. No, instead there was walls upon walls of green, reaching up into what would have been the neverending sky, but the sky wasn’t there. The green had taken over the sky, curling into itself, closing the sky and trapping it outside of the green. Not a single speck of blue, or gray, or whatever color the sky was today, could be seen.
It was dark without the sky, I couldn’t really see what was holding me down, but it felt like vines, dried old vines, peeling at the edges, and most likely brown with age. I thrust my hands up, scraping them off of me like they were fire, they came off quite quickly, all that practice with yarn from the cats finally coming in handy. Speaking of the cats, where were they? I didn’t see them anywhere, not like I really could without my glasses, or any light from the sun. But still, I didn’t see them, or hear them now that I think about it, and that was a problem.
My heart was going faster than I ever thought it could, I didn’t like being without the cats, whenever I wasn’t with the cats that meant that there were other people around, and I did not, like other people.
There was that one time when that little neighbor girl had tried to throw Coco into their pool, I screamed at her and, well, lets just say that her mom ended up calling the police on me. Not that it was my fault, she was the one trying to drown my cat. Poor Coco was never really the same after that. Oh! And when I tried to press charges for emotional damage to my cat, they sent me to a psychiatrist! A psychiatrist! I wasn’t the one who needed a psychiatrist, the people who sent me needed one!
Anyway, back on topic, it still felt like my heart was trying to rip itself out of chest, like one of the birds that always got caught in one of the cat’s claws. My mind was now the one telling my body to calm down, go back to deep breathing, just like how all the cats breath when they take naps.
My body calmed down again, openly accepting the reference to cats, cause that was really the only thing that could ever distract me if didn’t already notice, but my mind was just starting to run, rushing through coradoors, and galleys, trying to find where the cats could ever go.
Wherever I looked I saw green, the ground was covered in grass, the walls were covered in ivy, and the sky, I missed the sky. I stood up, I couldn’t stay here, not when I didn’t know where the cats had gone.
I slowly tied to make my way through the walls of ivy, my feet bushing against the grass, leaving fant footprints behind me. I kept walking along the path, it seemed to go on forever, green was the only thing that you could see in the distance, the thin lines of where the ivy disappeared into the ground blurring.
You couldn’t tell where the walls stopped and the ground started anymore, you couldn’t tell where the walls had started to curve into the sky. Without much light, all that there was the solid color of green, no variation in the color, no light or dark, just the consistent heavy color dragging me down.
I kept walking, straight as I could, trying to avoid as much of the green around me, and keeping away from the walls. I started walking faster, the walls looked like they were caving in on me, getting closer and closer, but never coming close enough to touch me on their own accord.
It was like they were begging me to touch them, whispering the quiet sound of an impossible wind running through them, telling me to reach out. As I continued through the hall of ivy, they still looked like they were slowly crawling into the sharply cut path. I begun getting slower again, looking at the leaves of the ivy, how they all swad together in the gentle breeze, murmuring to each other like children pointing fingers at someone and saying, “Who are they?”
I stopped, staring, they’re just leaves, my mind said, just, leaves. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were more than that, they was something wrong with them. Real leaves weren’t one solid color, real leaves didn’t all move together as if they were one thing, no these couldn’t be leaves. There was something off.
I reached my hand out, stopping right before touching.
“Do it,” they whispered.
It was silent.