…At least this is what they perceive.
The anxious distance between them, beyond their horizon of events, is traumatizing those two.
She writes in her notebook: “this is some severe complex PTSD”. They’re suspicious towards each other and what surrounds them.
A constant fear.
This is simply too pathetic. She freezes the scene.
The pair are the only two vertical elements of a flat horizontal world; their hands are raised in a desperate act. Forced to look in one direction at a time, while naked to the potential eyes that observe them from all sides.
The openness of their environment is the nemesis, the antagonist of their conscience.
One, very familiar, intimate world against the vastness of the unknown.
She knows what happened after.
She adds: “There isn’t any glimpse of calm in their still action. Perhaps just an infinitesimal fraction of hope that this won’t be their last day”.
She feels sorry for them although she can’t do anything besides trying to understand.
She walks around their bodies, frozen in time and space. She touches his cheek with a finger and feels the tight jaw underneath the skin. She then switches to her and passes her hand over her forearm and feels the raised hair and goosebumps.
Then she slips in between the two confronting figures and stares deep inside their black eyes. First her, then him, then her again, then him again. She starts to spin on her feet faster and faster so that she can see their eyes simultaneously. What were black points before begin to turn into a black circle the faster she spins. And she spins extremely fast now. There’s only a thick black circle around her. Then the circle becomes a sphere and she’s in the middle of it. She starts to perceive what lies beyond the memory of the two subjects, something like a cross-generational psychoanalysis, like the always-dying beast in the cave told her. Quite foggy at first, she begins to distinguish patterns that tend to repeat more often than others: need, expectation, disappointment, frustration, anger, fear, breakdown, apathy, disillusion, a mild satisfaction, greed and then need again. All in a loop.
She spins too fast now. She falls and vomits with her eyes closed thinking that it was a stupid idea after all.

When she opens them she’s overwhelmed by the spectacle that unfolds all around her.
What was a homogeneous curtain of black turned to be an extremely thick pattern of tiny dots. Some closer, some way more distant. All seem to be eyes turned towards her. All are rotating in a peaceful circular movement, pushed by a strong but constant whirlwind.
All are worried and confused.

She picks up her notebook from the ground and begins to count them by pointing at them with the pen. Each time she touches one, she draws a mark on a page. The eye then blinks irritated, relaxes and turns white.

[12345 12345 12345]

And so on.

1234…
Everything’s white now besides one last black dot quite far away.
As she gets closer she feels only a faint breeze brushing her cheeks and begins to hear a tune.
One voice, inside the dot.