It is paralyzing, laying on the sofa

Anne lay on the living room sofa, whose seating cushions, leather-clad, cicatrized, glued themselves onto her uncoated butt cheeks and lower back. The sofa blue, the cushions brown and the scars about to show up, before long, as gray indentations where as yet the erosion of its leather incrustation was merely perceptible by amalgamating with the sofa in a likewise private pose. She lolling, the springs squeaking, the noonlight enveloped her woman’s body from a different angle with every movement. She drew herself up; tilted her head to the left, placed it on her shoulder, considered the living room walls from this position atween upright and inverted. Then she let her head fall down her neck, very far, deep; it fell along her back and she lay on the sofa again. Bend legs, bare feet without the callus, crossed arms on top of her chest – in defiance of the shame that met her at times in this intimate exposure before the unclothed windows. She had been reading but now fallen into a tranquil doze which she expected to soon turn into unfeigned sleep. She needed the characteristic, habitual feeling of the fleece blanket over and around her to fall asleep and since it was very warm, she placed it in a thin line on her upper body, leaving her legs free. Thus placed, she took out earplugs that she had tucked into the side of her underpants. Now with the earplugs she changed her position again. The arms freed her breasts, which then pressed, under her top, more than before down onto her chest; one to the left and the other to the right and then, as she turned to the side and clamped her fleece blanket between her legs, both to the left; and the right sat on the left. She liked that, when her breasts lay together like that, and with her arms – elbows angled and both hands on the back of her head - and with her head formed this five-part association, whose sessions for nesting gathered almost only, and preferably, in the high sunlight. She did not pet her breast, she palpated the one through the other, sometimes rotating the shoulder that did not press into the mattress or stretching the back to produce the rubbing of the two halves of the skin in these minute movements. Her legs she handled in a similar way. She sewed one of them into the other, between them the fastened fleece blanket. The feeling was nice because the blanket gave the sensation of an external body that embraced her legs but omitted any expectation of a rising that dared to venture out to her inner thighs and an entry even higher. She looked out the window opposite the sofa, where the drawn curtains on both sides of the wall opening bathed in the wind and sometimes tinged yellow in the light, which matched her top and made her happy. At night, she had to darken her room completely and wear an eye mask so that she could realize a sleep, but at noon the light did not confine her, because it confirmed her the restfulness of her immobility, by approving the continuous activity of her environment, which determined her in its briskness to an outsider and she herself to an abnegating, and therefore all-surpassing controller. Even through the earplugs she still heard sounds. These also hindered her at night, but during the day weaved her comfortably into the lateral processes from which she was barred in her still positions. Thus involved in the goings-on, Anne turned now onto her right side, her breasts turned with her and her legs turned the blanket without having to clamp it anew. She had already slept for several seconds, several times, but had always come out again without falling asleep and intermittently dissolving. Therefore, she now began to gather her attention. For when it was just in one place, not indefinitely scattered and unclear, but centered and laying in front of her, she knew what to focus on to get away from. Oriented towards that point, she thus compressed her thoughts; she looked at the curtains and contemplated their swimming. And as she did so, she began to hear the curtains nestle against the wall, uncouple again, and disengage, and when the wind was strong, she heard the curtains perform the same sequence anew, but with each other's end. They shook hands or caressed each other's cheek and when they were happy, they glowed yellow and when they let go and said goodbye they were whitewashed again. Ten minutes later she still hadn't fallen asleep, but the fatigue she felt was close as before. The curtains were still in intimate contact, where, encouraged by several gusts of wind that had driven not only the curtains but also the soil in a flowerpot to emotion and spread soil on the living room floor, they had now approached one the other, slowly driving forward in a ceiling molding track and thus covering the window with an outstretched yellow sheath. This now constant spectacle no longer held Anne's attention - which needed centering after all - in clear coherence. She tried it from other perspectives, she looked at her living room furnishing out of novel angles and with an openness that was rarely granted to things one had known for years, but nothing concerned her as much as the curtains had done and what they had only been able to desist from because they had included her so strongly in their conversation in the previous moments. From where her head had just rested on the edge of the sofa seat cushions, she shoved herself onto her back and with the other side of her body, the one opposite the edge of the sofa, against the back of the mattress. She did not feel displeased as she lay there sleepless. The outage, her inability to disengage, drove thoughts to her that she usually counteracted by, any, occupations. Nothing unsettling, nothing dismal; normal thoughts that appeared to her all too dull for that normality, so she usually gave preference to externals. But today she listened for herself; her thoughts trotted on.