I woke up that morning in a cookie tin. It was your average-sized cookie tin. By the smell, I guessed that it had contained Danish butter cookies at some point in time. Not anymore. There wasn’t anything in there except for me. Little old me.
In case the reader hasn’t already figured this out, there really is not much to do in a cookie tin. You can throw stuff at the walls and listen to the loud clang of unspecified material hitting metal and then the echo of the sound waves taking a jog around your ears. You can also pound the walls with your fist and scream, if you’re the more desperate type. Or you can just sit there, crunched up into a little human ball, and close your eyes and pretend you’re in someplace beautiful instead of this damn tin cookie container. I did all of them. First the second then the first then the third. After a while you give up hope. I wasn’t sad, though. I was just resigned.
I had nothing better to do, so I reviewed the events of the past night. It had been a Sunday night. I was walking around the streets of the city aimlessly, trying to have my eye caught by something, some store, restaurant, club, person, anything. At about eight o’clock I began to get hungry. I went into the nearest restaurant that seemed cheap and generally not unappealing. People talked all around me. I couldn’t hear one person at a time, but rather an anonymous din of yells, whispers, screams, grunts, clangs of utensils on dishes, opinions, expressions, individuality, all the same old shit you get when you go out. The public is rather dull, they seem to all just be talking about variations on the same theme. I want ¬this I hate that. I don’t want to want anything anymore. People are always talking about it, and, to be honest, I’ve really become rather tired of it.
I ordered my food from a fresh-face young boy who’s nametag said ‘Albert’ on it. He seemed college age to me. I commented that you didn’t see younger people with that name anymore generally speaking anyways and he replied that his parents were living in the past man or at least they had been when they had him. I ordered a turkey sandwich with tomatoes and other stuff on it and he brought it back in about ten minutes. Pretty fast cooks here huh I commented yeah he replied. I ate the sandwich. Tolerable, it filled me up. The tomatoes were crunchy.
After that, I left to go walk around some more. Nothing notable happened. Just the minutes backwards somersaulting by and the hours snowballing until it was midnight and I was tired so I went home. I had an place on fifty-second street. I walked into the apartment and flicked on the lights. I filled my pipe, lit it, and put on a Coltrane record. After the album was over, I read a bit and went to sleep.
I had one dream that night. They say that we have lots of dreams every night, it’s just that we don’t remember them. The ones that I can’t remember are obviously irrelevant. The one I can is rather irrelevant also. In it, I was sitting in a cave. It was underground. There was one stalagmite, standing way up tall, parsing my field of vision into two halves. One the right half, the rocks that made up the cave walls were blue. They had scratches all over them, as if a lion had been sharpening his nails on them. The other side had green rocks. They were actually black, but there was so much moss growing on them that they were green for all intents and purposes. I remember thinking that the moss was poisoning the air and that I was going to die and that then the lions were going to come home and eat my remains with chopsticks and fried green beans. A cold gust of wind blew through the cave. I thought that that meant that maybe there was a way out. The air had to come from somewhere. I searched frantically all over the walls of the cave to find an opening, but to no avail. I felt myself begin to suffocate slowly, and as my face turned blue, the whispering came out of nowhere –
I woke up then. Or maybe I just don’t remember the rest of it. It doesn’t matter anyways.
The tin can began to get colder and colder. Eventually it froze. The ice began to creep along the walls, slowly and steadily making its advance toward me. I sat there, shivering, waiting for the ice to envelop me.
In the end, it didn’t really hurt that much.
