Evening. The day took a strange turn, I tell myself. I came home early, I shouldn't have done that. Too early - I surprised my own absence. I shouldn't have been here. Should have let my absence thicken in the half darkness. Should have let it thicken, my absence, where the red blind, closed against light but letting it through, makes the whole room red.
But I came home early, and caught the day making its turn. Had it meant me to? Was that what it wanted? To be caught - surprised? For the day to have led me all the way into itself? It led nowhere, in one way. In one way - nowhere, the day was a dead end. But in another that dead end made way, and I pass along its ending, its eternal detour.
What happened here? What did I surprise? Red light, through the blind. The quiet flat, with no tenants above. Quiet, the wooden floors exposed and the room very big. Bigger than usual, I thought. It would take time to cross this room, I thought. To cross it would take and expand time, I thought.
The day took a strange turn. Into itself. All the way into itself. As though it were a labyrinth. As though a single straight line, a passage, was also a labyrinth. I don't like the day; I feel wary of it. I dislike the malaise of time, the way it leaves me aside.
Nothing happens here - nothing, but it thickens, nevertheless. Thickens, not ripens. A wrong growth, an aberrant one. Error leading into itself. The day took a strange turn, and took me with it.
I didn't want to go. I'd been somewhere already. I'd come home, and found - it was not home. The day had taken a strange turn here. The day had concentrated itself into itself here. Thickened. Grown - and wrongly. What had gone wrong? Should I leave? Should I go back to the office?
I opened a bottle of wine. I thought, that's it: a bottle of wine. To do combat against the day. To match its vagueness with my own. Wine! Is that enough? To meet the day's opacity with my own? To forget as the day forgets; to make a mirror for its nothingness?
The day took a strange turn, and so did I. It took a turn and I came here to write, a bottle of wine beside me. I'll meet it, I thought. I'll meet the day on its own terms, I thought. Match vagueness with vagueness, I thought. Sound the muffled bell, I thought. Write in ambush for whatever comes.