'Here'

I have been trying, when I can, to write 100 words a day, five days of the week. It’s a useful target: slight enough to feel like nothing-at-all, yet enough to get you going.

Here is one of the pieces, which feels complete enough to me to share.

HERE

He remembered his other life quite vividly. It seemed somehow absurd to be here now instead of there. Every night asleep he is back there. Each morning it takes a moment to adjust to his being here. Sometimes that moment takes all day. Once it took a month. By the third week of that month he began to think he would never readjust.

Finally he alighted on a strategy of conscious dreaming. In his dreams he would direct himself back here, night by night. But it was not his self that he directed, but some fragment of his self that, in dreams, still belonged to that other life. If he could stay here, he thought, he would not need to go back. Perhaps he needn’t wake. If he did not wake he would not need to readjust. But in his dream he remembered his other life quite vividly.