Cloudscape

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.