Laina hadn't moved in, she guessed, four hours. She'd lain down on the carpet of her room, plucked a string on the guitar a few feet away, and then hadn't moved for two hundred forty minutes. She blinked now and then. And she kept breathing. But she hadn't really moved.
She could not discern why this was so--her not moving and her general "not-movingness" that had developed internally as the not moving continued externally. She felt deadened. It was as if someone had, in that moment of acute pain when she'd taken it upon herself to lie down on the carpet of her floor, stuck her with a syringe full of soul-novocaine. And since then she hadn't moved.
She ran her tongue against the back of her teeth. They were smooth as all get out, but had weird little bumps and ridges, like you might expect of a topographical-map-made-model. Her eyes hurt from staring through the legs of her bed so long. She had counted the thirteen different wood grain knots in her floorboard seventeen times. She had counted how many times she'd counted her counting. Four times.
She felt absolutely nothing.
She longed to be high or drunk or rolling or tripping or something. But she could not bring herself to get up. And in the place she knew she should have felt guilt or crushing failure in wanting to resort to drugs, she felt a sort of a squeegeeish feeling. A lumpy, wet, nearly-soapy cleanness. An almost kind of dirty cleanness.
She breathed in, once, deeply, and she held the breath. Then she breathed out.
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