sleep schisms and new shades

I’d fallen asleep in a theatre hall, it might have been an hour or a month. the seats had been left vacant and weighty crumbs of smoke exhausted the cinerous air. I knew the room well, for it began within me, asunder and shielded, from the red of the curtains to the penumbra dramas. their warmth emerged somewhere at the midpoint my cells, as a binding sequence of exit. yet that night it was vacuous and drained of crimson, as if its very shades had wearied out their hemic performance and abjured diseased to the bleakness of crumbled paper.
my eyes, drowsed with sleep, could hardly tell the nature of the play unfolding before them. rambling, ear-splitting monologues encircled the room in unfathomable pounds, thrashing deepening cracks on walls and ascending up my body in the shape of fever. I felt my feet dragged forcibly from the ardor of my anchorage to some bleak, recondite ground whose contingence I refused to adjoin. till there was nothing but utmost silence, a silence too inordinate for the inflection of my breaths. it was as if the actors consented to quitclaim the unyieldingness of their acts: some left the stage, some remained deadpan, some sat down with their hands covering their faces, some motionlessly looked the other way.
I laid my head on my arm and watched them as, one by one, they stepped back and began to gradually turn to paper... and, as the swelling fever was marching on my eyelids, I could only ask myself which of them would be the first to shatter and turn to ashes.