Joseph Keyes - Journal Entry #002

We stare at each other for the longest instant. Not if a void yawned open in the sky to swallow eternity could I have broken the contact locked between our pupils in that grey deluge. She told me later she’d never seen anything like the hollow in my eyes. Her name’s Jamie. She’s a psychologist, self-proclaimed to be very good at what she does. She said she’d treat me for a little while. I wished her luck. She smiled coyly, inclined her head and pulled open the back door of her car, a sheaf of blackish chestnut sliding past her left ear to hang closer to her dark eyes. She had me in a stranglehold, every hair on end, every nerve ending turned into a static receptor. I could have rubbed sparks off my skin. I got in. When she said we were going back to her place, I wasn’t sure what to expect, or even what I wanted, but all we did was sit in her living room and talk. I’m not supposed to write in detail about our “sessions”. She wore glasses with square frames. She is ever so gorgeous, and seemingly unaware of it. She seems a little insecure about her looks. This strikes me as odd, considering what she does. I wanted to ask her about that, but I was too nervous. After a while she stopped asking questions and scribbled intently in her notebook for at least ten minutes, then stood abruptly and said she’d take me back. She lives in a much better sector than me. She drove me through Wall 5 and then I asked her to stop, said I felt like walking a bit. We pulled quietly up and I got out without saying a word, pausing before I closed the car door to fall into her eyes for another pregnant moment, and she was gone.

It was very late by then, cold neons burning bars of light into my retinas from the sides of most buildings, though down at street level all was steeped in gloom. Sector 8 is dangerous at night. You don’t know who will come out once the skylights go down. I hardly cared, only wandered. I didn’t make for my apartment, it’s a long way from Wall 5. It didn’t matter that I had nowhere to sleep, I couldn’t have slept then. I felt utterly lucid, pacing through the decaying labyrinth in perfect insomnia. Let time sync me to its deathly pull tomorrow. This night is mine.