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Blackness covered Colin like a warm blanket. No, not a warm one. Rather, a blanket of no temperature. Not cold. Not warm.
“What blanket? - I don’t feel a blanket.” Colin thought to himself. He moved his hand to touch the blanket that may or may not have been there. Nothing happened. He felt nothing. He was not sure if his hand actually moved. Was he strapped down? Was he drugged? What was going on? Where the hell was he?
He tried to feel his hand again. He tried to move his other hand to bring his hands together. He could not tell what position his hands were in. He felt as though perhaps he had no hands. But surely he had hands! He remembered having hands! But he knew how hands were supposed to feel, and he did not feel those feelings. He started to panic.
“Am I dead?” he wondered. “Is this what dead is like? But, no. That doesn’t make any sense.” He began to talk sense into himself. To calm his nerves, he just needed to think this through. “If I were dead I’d either be somewhere, or I would not be at all. I would not be just nowhere like this!” He tried to listen for clues. At first there was nothing. Not a sound. But then...
“Was that something? Did I just hear something? It sounds like wind.” Maybe it was just his imagination. Maybe not.
“Maybe grey.” Wind is the “grey” of the sound world. It is indistinguishable from all the sounds at once, or no sound at all.
“What a weird thought!” he laughed, without laughing, but the phrase seemed to catch in his mind, tumbling around, and echoing.
“Maybe grey, maybe grey.”
It was somehow soothing. The unhearable sound of wind began to fade out, and cross over into a grey light. A wet mist rolled across his mind, smudging the words. Each triplet of syllables distorted into an ever evolving cloud billow, superimposed upon the last, a pattern stretching backwards and forwards through what he could only assume was some kind of space-time field. He saw the clouds in his mind at once, racing faster and faster, and simultaneously frozen, as if they had not moved in countless eons. He knew each cloud to be a reflection of himself. They became an endlessly receding set of parallel mirrors, reflecting his image back and forth to one another across a non-existent room. But he had no hands. No body. He was only a face. His hair was blurred. His teeth were somehow visible, though behind a strange expression on closed lips. His eyes were closed, sealed. They were grown over. They looked like skin, and felt like moss. His mysterious teeth seemed to glow. They emitted a soft light, a lighter shade of grey that slowly grew brighter, yet somehow more faint. He was tired. He was very, very tired.