My Skin is Cold

As children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shinning shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature. (Lucretius, Book II, De Rerum Natura)

Neither asleep nor fully awake, I am lying in bed and no longer know where I am. There is a darkness and the sensation of my body lying flat. My body is still and my eyes are half-closed. When I seek orientation, then an impasse seizes me: in these brief but dense moments that unfold when I am partly wake, things have lost their place. My skin turns cold and I feel myself grow anxious. This is a vertigo without movement, a dizziness with no spatial depth. A searching takes place in the dark, and I think of hotels in Pittsburgh, my childhood home, a guesthouse in Montana, a cottage in London, transit terminal in far-off lands. Grey light from the streetlamps can be seen under the crack beneath the door, but things with names have lost their resonance, and cues from the external world eschew all familiarity.

A woman is lying next to me, and I turn to her. Truly, her face is familiar but I cannot name her despite knowing in objective terms that I slept beside her for the last year. She is flesh, she is space, but she is also pure anonymity, a void set alight by my perception. To be clear, this omission is not a fault in my memory. I remember the features on this face and the different rooms that I have inhabited. This face is a feature of my lifeworld, its appearance is an indication of my own being. But in these privileged moments - perhaps no more than 6 or 7 seconds - when I am not fully awake but neither fully asleep, something else is interceding: it is the space between worlds, lurking between the living and the dead.


This is the world of prepersonal life: anonymous, cold, deserted, a plenitude of nothingness, both vast and colossal. Before my body has come to its senses, before I slowly begin to realise where and when I am, then the glimmer of this chthonic realm briefly materialises. Only by becoming habitualized through waking life does anxiety quieten. But the reprisal of familiarity is illusive, and at all times, I am aware that beneath me, the other side of things—mute, silent, nameless—stares back into the living, breathing world, affecting its presence in the very materiality of my skin.