Robert sits with his head in his hands next to the stereo and tries to wish away the tide of what feels like it might be a particularly bad acid trip. The first hint is when the wall with the Sonic Youth poster on it begins to look a lot further away than it usually does. Everything in front of him looks stretched out.
The next sense to start betraying usual perception is his hearing. The song that’s playing – some lofi punk thing, some hipster thing that he couldn’t convincingly sell to himself let alone the people he’d been trying to impress – sounds like it has been shrouded with a huge blanket made of water, like a wave but softer, it sounds muffled but a lot louder too.
Occasionally there’s respite. Robert turns his head and the music seems to make sense again. Then it switches back, sounds more like a modem warming up, slowed down, the lyrics, guitar, whatever, reduced to its components cut up into all the tiny discrete parts that are usually left for the ear to decode before the listener actually hears it. Robert thinks something along the lines of shit, I’m hearing this stuff before my ears do … he laughs, or grins wide eyed, amused at how like a stupid hippy he was starting to sound. He’s almost relieved to laugh.
Things feel so surreal and disarming that this stuff might be funny. Scary. But funny. Could go either way, he thinks.
Robert turns around. He realises how empty everything looks, how still, forgets that there’s a loud punk song playing, and feels peaceful for a second. He can’t tell if he feels calm or just alone. His friends have gone to other parts of the house.
Maybe I should try seeing what outside of the room looks like.
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