Somewhere Only We Know, Part I

Jim sat in a tortured room of all browns--brown walls, brown floors, brown furniture, and brown light--his mind lost in the gloom of the woods of his youth, where browns and greens combined with yellows and shifting lights.  Dead wood, living wood; living life, dying memories.

Jim wasn't his real name--at least, it didn't have to be.  He had a name, but it didn't matter at that stage what it was or should be, only that he had one.  Up close it didn't matter.  Far away it didn't matter.  The living boxes piled around him, above, below, on all sides; and they were equally filled with him, or other hims, in an outward radius, filling the immensity of space.  Or at least of his world.  Or his city.  All of which was one and the same.  And he was in the center of it all.

But he wasn't even there.  His mind explored those woods, where nothing else mattered, in the woods or out, in his mind or out.  He little cared which was right and which was wrong, let alone understood anything as nuanced as fiction and reality.  Was he a young boy in the woods dreaming of his adulthood in a brown box in a brown city, or was he an adult dreaming of exploring the woods of his youth?  Which was better?  Was it better to be in the future looking back at those woods, or was it better to be in those woods dreaming of such a brown future?

Jim sat, estranged from his own world, from his own self, from his own feelings.  And yet he felt he was going somewhere, that there was some purpose, unlike some character in some disgusting existentialist play.  He was not trapped in a room, but free in the woods.  Wasn't he?  Wasn't he free to leave his room and his dreams?  Wasn't he free to explore both his memory and his brown city?  Exits were everywhere.  Even his confines were an exit from his thoughts.

As he slid between moments, played time-travel with his life, Jim was kidnapped into one of them with the force of an alarm.  An actual alarm, ringing, screaming through his brown building.  He grabbed his shoes and, without looking back, ran out the door, down the stairs, out of the building, and into the brown night.