Fun New Talent

If there was any lesson he would desire to be learnt from this experience, it would be that every time someone said “I wish I knew what I looked like from the back”, they were delusional. Ignorance is bliss is it not, they simply do not know how lucky they are to not have to be faced with, well, themselves.

He had not been too surprised to awaken from those much too common dreams of work, and not open his eyes to his own ceiling, but instead to his partner’s. He was, however, rather surprised, when he blinked and was back in his own room, the place he was pretty sure he had begun the night. Perhaps he had imagined it, perhaps it had been a leftover from his dream, perhaps it was just a trick of the light. The morning sun was weak and wintery, the gloom from outside was leaking in through the windows and he would not be surprised if it was capable of making some shadows coincidental enough to trick him into losing track of his location briefly. Shaking his head, a habit he had developed in the hopes it would one day make a scrap of difference, he stood up and prepared himself for another long day at work.

Work. He could see his partner’s house again, this time he was not in bed, he was in the kitchen and he was buttering a slice of toast with one hand and stirring a cup of milky tea with the other. Rather impressive multitasking if he did say so himself, except he was not sure he would be saying it himself at all, because whilst he knew those hands like, well, the back of his hand, they sure were not his. He was looking at his partner’s hands making breakfast and the second before he had not even been in the same flat. And then that was it, all was over again, and he was back to sitting on the edge of his own bed, wondering why anyone would drink their tea with quite so much milk in it.

Whilst it had been a worrisome potential symptom of some life threatening disease he was sure to be diagnosed with, his new tendencies to not be in his body any longer had not had any detrimental effects. That was until he arrived at work, gritting his teeth more than he had been when he left, due purely to the amount of red lights he had encountered on his way. He had been so distracted by making sure he did not get angry at large non-sentient lights too early in the morning, he had not had much of the chance to think about anything too work related until he made it there and pulled in simultaneously with his partner who had arrived at the same time. And then he was still driving a car, but he was dressed differently, the chair was closer to the pedals, and he was aiming for a different space. So staring at someone else’s ceiling of a morning for a second or two was confusing but at least it was not harmful, separating soul from body whilst driving a car was, however, probably not recommended.

He began to think he must surely be very ill throughout the next half an hour or so. Morning briefing was never his favourite time of day but neither was it his least, this time however, a new level of interesting had been added. A mention of a drive down south in the morning made him wonder whether he could manage to convince his partner to drive them if he asked very nicely, and ended in his watching the room from a slightly different perspective and unable to resist turning to the side to watch his own self out of the corner of his eye. As if nothing had happened, he was back again watching the room from where he had originally placed himself. Minutes later he was yet again standing next to himself when he was silently handed a cup of lukewarm tea from the man through whose eyes he could now see.

It was widely accepted as being rather rude to walk away halfway through a conversation, also rather rude to try to concentrate on just about anything apart from the person you were talking to, but he figured his disoriented stumbling as he walked briskly away was enough to convince his partner that he was ill, not impolite. Trying to concentrate on what he was saying whilst switching continuously between viewpoints was irritating, but more than anything it made him feel rather travel sick, an excuse for which he could not conjure standing in a corridor, feet planted solidly on the floor. The problem of the rest of the day could be faced once he was safely hidden away in the toilets, thinking of everything except his partner and this fun new talent he had somehow developed overnight.

A knock at the bathroom door and he was back, stood outside the bathroom he had seconds ago been inside of, watching a hand that still was not his trying the door handle for the second time. He decided he was going to have to go home, collect all the luck he could find together in a large pile, and go to sleep. Perhaps if the luck held out he would wake up tomorrow morning and this would all be a very strange memory never to be mentioned to anyone. He did not like the prospect that this was to stay, there was no feasible way of working like this, no real way of living like this either. It simply had to go, he refused to consider it not doing so, and very soon at that. He might wake up at any second and realise he had been dreaming this whole time but for now he had to get home and he had to find something incredibly interesting to read or watch or do. Anything to think about that meant he stayed in his own head.

The escape from the building was complicated and troublesome, he gave up many times on the decision to warn anyone that he was gone, opting for the much less bewildered option of heading straight out and hopefully almost getting hit by a car once or twice to provide a distraction. In the end, he was blessed with a solid minute or two in which he paid extraordinary amounts of attention to having a conversation with today's secretary, explaining he was very very ill and he very very needed to go home immediately, and if his partner wondered where he was and got it into his head to go and check on him, he should be very very thoroughly convinced that was not a good idea at all.