PART I: MIND - Chapter 1: First Street
My eyes open up very gradually, as I slowly get accustomed to the light.
Fortunately, the latter is not too overwhelming,
It feels as if it is very early or very late in the day, but I cannot yet be sure as to which of the two the case is.
I inspect my surroundings.
A narrow street opens up in front of me.
I know that this is First Street, but I don’t know what this means.
Low whitewashed houses stand on both of its sides.
A number of cars, neither very old nor very new, are parked here and there.
There appears to be no sign of any activity whatsoever; both space and time feel frozen.
I begin to walk.
I walk straight ahead, refusing to turn my head left, right or backwards.
As I walk, I can feel the vague fragments of a little thought moving around inside my head, fighting to unite themselves into a coherent whole.
I realise that these are actually not the fragments of a thought, but rather of a memory.
I stop in the middle of the road, with my eyes half-closed, waiting for this shattered memory to emerge as a whole in my consciousness.
Alas, this never happens; instead, three images, for which it is unclear whether they are related with one another or not, pop up in the proverbial screen of my mind.
Image 1: The face of a smiling girl, as I see it from sideways and below, which is mostly darkened by the setting sun, that is right behind her as I am looking at her; critically, therefore, distorting the clarity of my field of vision and, thus, obstructing my capability to discern her facial characteristics.
Image 2: A strange contraption, which is located in a big storage room that gives the strong impression of being somewhere underground, with a lot of lights blinking on its surface; most prominently two big rectangular ones close to the top – a red one on its left hand side and a black one on its right hand side – resembling two eyes; and a big, white-coloured, circular one, right in the middle, resembling a mouth.
Image 3: A wet, Cheshire, moon (i.e. a crescent moon of which the “horns” point up at an angle, away from the horizon, so that the moon takes the shape of a bowl or a smile) that I am looking at, on a perfectly still and quiet night, down from the big veranda of a dark apartment situated on one of the highest floors of a tall building overlooking what looks like a major road artery close to the centre of a big city.
I mentally record the three images, before proceeding further down the road, only to be intercepted by a big, fluffy, white cat that seems to have materialised out of nowhere, just a handful of steps ahead of me.