First Pages: Some Women

just homey enough to sleep deeply after a nice sedative – iron shirts, and maybe veg out for a day or two once in a while. Memories and novelties were derived from my smartphone or perhaps from old magazines; couldn’t keep too much stuff around. I sent most of my things through the cubby service back home to my parents.

I’d been based in the city for a couple of years now, always returning to the apartment after being away. A couple of times, I had let one of the girls stay there, and this was another reason not to keep a lot of stuff around – anything around.

Out on the pavement again now, headed for the subway. I was still in some sort of fog but snapped out of it again about a block away from the train. I tried to recollect something specific from only a moment ago, for example, the stairwell leading down to the first floor of the studio. It took a moment, but when I relaxed, I remembered the smell. It had been musty in the building, with only one diffuse source of light that’d been flickering from the ceiling in the hallway. When I first headed outside, I had expected to be struck by the brightness of the day and maybe to feel the warm sun on my face, but instead, the sky had been strangely dark, making it unreasonable to be wearing glasses.

We were in the studio for such a short time; perhaps my brain-autopilot hadn’t recalibrated. If I thought about it, the last few days, in fact… or perhaps longer, had seemed a complete blur all around. I just had not been feeling quite as excited or as motivated as I normally felt. Something had changed. It seemed like every day, I was having trouble remembering where I had been and what had gone on. Perhaps, I wasn’t focusing enough on my career or not looking at it from the proper perspective. I certainly didn’t feel the same sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. My attentions in general, seemed to be, dimmed. TURN PAGE