Short story comp entry (Theme: Serenity - 522 words *WARNING* No characterisation or plot)

I’m determined not to look out the window and describe the weather. All avenues about it have been exhausted. Basically there’s nothing one can say that would add any further vitality to the lexicon of descriptions about “the weather.” So...my blinds are closed. It could be sunny or cloudy, all I know is light is sifting through the blinds and I’m bathed in a brown sort of twilight, feeling content. I’m staring at my ceiling with the curious thought that I inhabit something of a shoebox. A cuboid four walls, floor and a ceiling, with the carpet stripped back to reveal nutty, time-tested strips of wood. I'm in an enclosure yet I feel free. How absurd.

Something is out of place. Why am I so content? For instance my wallpaper. Look at it. It's dead, lifeless, lacking in...zest. By all means it should be a source of discontent. For if you stare at the ridiculous sky-blue abyss for long enough as Nietzsche said the abyss might stare back at you. But this is not always a bad thing. I pick at the wallpaper, and fashion little white balls, rolling the bits of paper between the index and thumb where I then flick it across the room. I’m content because I’ve no job to do today, no stress levels cranked to the rafters, or power dynamics in place which places me at the bottom of a hierarchical ladder with no authority or respect. No ambition, no drive. I am the happiest man alive.

Pick a label. Call me lazy, a dreamer. Whatever. I close my eyes and on the back of the lids are plasma TV screens. It beams an image right across the horizon of my brain, which due to a lack of imagination is a virtual reality of the room I am sitting in. So what's the point? I open them. I see my curtains. For some reason I’m pre-occupied with them to an obsessive degree which unsettles me, if only for a moment. Those yellow monstrosities, complete with heinous blotches of blue, are designed in such a way as to crudely match the wallpaper. Looking in detail at the curtains reveals a sort of fine interweaving fabric, the same way if you suddenly look closely at your thumb a unique fingerprint is slowly revealed as the eye focuses. Wallpaper, curtains, abyss, fabric, lots of time to reflect...what’s it all about, eh?

I remember watching Eraserhead one time, and one thing that struck me was the lady inside the radiator. She was perfectly happy doing a quirky little horizontal dance from one side of a stage to the other, to chirpy organ music on a loop. The repetitive music and dance routine suggested never-ending, cyclical eternity, but she looked so satisfied and content, and you were left in doubt she enjoyed her job as a vocation rather than a duty. And who’s to castigate her for not conforming to expectations? If, of her own free will that is, she wants to dance inside a radiator without anyone watching...Why would anyone burst her bubble?