Awareness skitters off the world's surface. You are not in the body that they have always told you is yours: you are in the wind trailing across your skin and twining its fingers through your hair, in the dance of birds across ill-tended ground and the beauty of peeling paint.
In the distance a car's horn, the rush of traffic, an angry shout, and you are there too, body left behind to plod through its motions. It doesn't need you. There is grass growing in the cracks of the sidewalk and a bug crawling towards the shade and they are more you than this.
Attention is a currency, and you freely spend it; drifting, skipping, your body's edges coming unpeeled. Boundaries bleed, their false inevitability diffusing like blood in water, dripping like ink down rude wood. Not even a cut: forget that there was ever skin.
"I'm not here," you say, "not really."
The words crawl ungainly from your splayed mouth.
"I'm just dissociated. Sorry."
A body is such a big responsibility. A puppet that you can never really put down. Always demanding things, always complaining. Such a horrid thing.
It's no wonder that you don't spend much time in it. Better to be—well, anywhere. Outside. In the touch of fingers on keycaps and the reassuring clatter of well-chosen switches. Drifting through seas of information. Dissolving into sensation. Distraction. Dissociation.
Is that true?
Maybe.
Does it need to be?