I woke up and felt the cold air coming in from the cracks around the window. In the winter morning dark I lay, and listened to the muffled sounds of cars slowly moving about on a fresh layer of snow.

I took a shower so hot it stung my face and shoulders red, and they itched when I got out.

I ate oatmeal with milk. Then I stood outside of my door smoking and shaking, watching the snow whirl in the orange of the streetlight.

I walked to work, through neighborhoods that were barely stirring, no one else on the sidewalks.

I work alone, staring at a computer screen for twelve hours, minus one for lunch. Typing, not words.

When I get out, it is dark. The day has slipped past without sunlight falling on my skin. I walk home. I take main streets so that I can watch the traffic. See impatience and competition between motorists in the inclement weather. There are few pedestrians but the ones that brush past me are the closest human contact that I've had all day; some of them even briefly make eye contact.

I get home and I sit in front of my personal computer, with microwave dinner. I read news stories and look at pictures. Then I watch a television show.

I go to bed.

I lie and let my eyes acclimate to the darkness. I watch shadows of form slowly define themselves. I can distinguish the fan blades spinning from the soft reflection of light flashing off them. I stare at the ceiling. I look out the window through the cracks of the blinds. Spindly tree arms silhouetted against an orange sky, the winter night sky of the city. The snow is still falling.

I close my eyes and listen. Listen to the dwindling of traffic. The distant trains and highways. Occasional sirens, or voices on the sidewalks outside. In moments of stillness maybe even the swaying and creaking of the trees.

I wait and wait for sleep to come. I practice discipline by not looking at my watch's green face illuminated in the dark. It does not help to know.

I open my eyes again, to see if they feel heavy with sleep. They do not. I turn and turn. From back to side to stomach to side to back again. I sit up and look out the window.

I feel the cold coming in around it. I hear the muffled lurch and roar of the basement furnace, and dry hot warm air starts to blow out of the vents. I try to lie down again and fall asleep.

I look at my watch and see that it is 4:07 a.m., and in less than an hour I will be getting up.

I take deep breaths in attempt to allay the anxiety that comes with this revelation. Deep breaths, until I feel warm and vacuous in my head.

I wake up in the same darkness. I feel the cold from the window, and hear the muffled sound of cars pushing slowly out onto the snow covered streets.

I am undergoing a change of phase.  The materials of my body have softly and slowly spread themselves apart, into the finest mist of particles, a diaphanous cloud in rough human shape over my bed. Having at least freed themselves from the restrictive chemical bonds of personhood, my materials begin to convect themselves about the room, slowly filling the space in whorling eddies and vortices that splay themselves out in the wake of fan blades and the jets of heater vents. A fine film of myself lays itself over every surface, commingling with the dust that represents dirt and dead cells of other selves from across the ages. Other bits find the cracks around the windows and doors and escape into the world. The night outside these portals is blustery and wet, and bits of myself are immediately blown to all directions. It is only a small fraction of myself that has made it outside the walls, and the fraction rapidly diminishes the further away from my house. But some atoms go far. Some atoms traverse the skies and seas of the earth. Some deposit upon animate and lifeless bodies that convey them about, or are absorbed and become pieces of other things or travel through them. It becomes rapidly apparent that these particles are not truly mine at all; they are the sum of millions of people and animals and plants and rocks and objects and non-objects and motes and meteors and photons and fission, from all the way backwards in time to all the way forwards. For an impossibly brief moment only they came together into me, with electrical impulses guiding the way and electrons and chemicals shooting about all over the place and creating my thoughts and actions. Aside from what I control of my own thoughts every bit of it is as impartial and uncaring as the rest of the universe. The body is a vessel that is willing to turn on itself at the influence of only a few foreign particles. Your body is a conscious experiential tool that when worn out takes you with it, back into the pool of unconscious experience. But even now with my particles spread across the earth, I feel them all. I feel the breezes that envelope the earth.

I wake to the rattling of ephemera on my shelves as the pre-dawn delivery trucks speed haphazardly down my street. A neighbor is in the bathroom on the other side of the wall behind my head. I listen to the water running, and the soft sounds of preparation. The traffic is light but for the trucks. The weather is as it was in my dream, gusts of spattery rain intermittently running across my window.

But today, there is no work to trudge to. Today is a fulminating nightmare of zero expectation.