The Flicker
L. was sitting calmly in his room. All of a sudden, he felt a heavy cloud on his chest, he couldn’t breathe normally. He was suffocating. He tried to reach out to his bottle of water. His mouth was put open to receive a sip so that he could feel alive again. He tasted a sore heavy liquid like coagulated milk. He spit it immediately. L. still couldn’t breathe that is why he opened the door to take some fresh air. Dizziness took over his head and he felt unaware. He was on the roof and tried to call someone to help him. The call didn’t go out of his mouth. His head harshly hit the ground and he was looking at a far pale light coming from the sky as tiny as a fiber. L. was dying in that bare cold night. “I am alone, no one is here, no one is with me…!” He was telling himself.
He woke up and his chest was going up and down because of the terrifying nightmare. He sat up on the bed looking at the ground and his head was flowing with scatered thoughts. “Am I not alone now?” He thought. For him, it was the same situation. After a while of shredding, he decided to drink some water and he was afraid that the same thing might happen.
Instead, L. opened the door to get into the dark toilet, washed his hands and face. He went to the right spot where he fell in the dream. He was asking himself why exactly that spot and not another one. L. knew that a specific detail had no significance as well as his existence. He went to his bed in a shock but with a doubtable acceptance of death. He thought that he might die while he was sleeping and he wouldn’t know that either he is still asleep or dead.
Waking up the following morning with the decision to change his life and the question floated in his mind like a wood stick in the water. “ but what’s wrong with my current life?” It was rather fine, but he wanted to do things before he dies.
He went to work like pseudo man, a ghost-like body. He slept at a meeting because he was exhausted of work. The meeting was about new rules which should be applied. They seemed like new chains that would be added to the previous ones and enchain him so tightly. He feels more and more breathless with every new task or order given.
He has got the work, his family, his friends, and his heavy existence on his shoulders. Each of them L. needs to show certain kind of behaviors. He believes that he lives more than one life, and he lives lives he doesn’t want. That is why we see the majority of people have various personalities. Each life they live requires a personality. Consequently, L. feels confusion, disturbance, and dizziness. He can’t go on in life until he changes like a chameleon and for the same reason why chameleon changes its color…to survive.
L. is back home now, sitting motionless and thinking about the nightmare he had the night before. “Can be the rules and orders the suffocating part? and can be the lives I live the dizziness part?… I am alone even now…! So, am I dying now?” he thought.
