Chapter Text
The lights went off that day in that exact moment once again. There was no exact thing to cling onto and pursue what has already been started, with only the pit-pat-pat of the rain wanting to break the windows like the superheroes in films and let darkness flow out of the room similar to thick, blood-like lightless pus. This was not right. In the slightest. Without all the mothering correctness of light the choking flat felt alien and Alex’s body suddenly felt too wide and unable to survive in this environment. The air molecules battled with his skin, fiercely pushed aside by rows and rows of square centimetres of his layered body. He could almost see a perfect picture of them sliding off his skin like droplets of water and waving far behind as if he left a hand-drawn trail behind him. The cartoonish superheroes suddenly seemed pathetic if anyone could leave the super-speed trail behind their bodies. Just like always. The darkness suddenly seemed even more terrifying and the accelerating water outside broke at the brittle glass wishing to reclaim pathetic human abodes and overflow them with a static fizz of an aeon-old compound. Alex thought of all those monsters which jump out of closets and stand beside children’s beds like grotesque breathing trees wishing to consume the young flesh and endlessly terrify. He didn’t even have a bedside closet as a kid. How different. Alex shuddered even though the temperature stayed constant. Difference seemed to work its way inside him and nest inside his chest like an irregularly shaped rock, pricking his ribs from the inside with its sharp crystalline formation edges. All those sweet tiny quarks, trembling neutrinos, blushing muons and more and more and more subatomic particles which rolled in his imagination like shiny candies ready to be bitten into by an vigorous physicist’s brain – all of them achieved stability by being what they always were, not too different, always eager and doing their little important jobs. Just like little office workers in tiny office buildings stacked on top of each other to form dogs, road signs, politicians and all that is there to be in the world, understandable and so easily looked inside. If only there were more ways to look inside, though. Dissecting plant cells, studying nitrogen ions, it was not enough – barely enough to gather information to explain even the most basic and simple structures which often proved to be the most difficult. Alex sat down at the grippy table, the old oaken chair cracking under his weight. The instability rearranged his body. The kitchen was a fear of of any claustrophobic human being and any proper housewife recreated in reality with overwhelming attention to the tiniest, most disgusting microscopic bits. The grime seemed too horrifying to touch. It worked its way around the metal of the kitchen sink, leaving a brown trail behind like a miniature army dying miniature deaths and bleeding in disorganized rude puddles. Alex despised it with all his soul but was pathetically afraid. The filth did not lay out its molecular structure out in front of him like a good girl, it did not explain itself but decided to cling on to the sink, creeping up the ceramic-faced blocks lining the walls like a chess-board of only one colour. It planted seeds of doubt in his brain which risked to sprout out and grow on his head, disguising as strands of long, oily hairs. He was afraid that they would contaminate his skin, consuming it second by second like a peculiar type of cancer and ultimately reach his brain. The tip-tap-top-top-tap repeated with the same volume and did not change acceleration. Alex felt the darkness gnaw on his bones and opened the water, pulling a short white piece of thin toilet paper from a nearby roll. He was too afraid to place it on the table, because the cancer would not look at the absence of cells, the presence of atoms was already enough for it to spread its somon-coloured contamination. Locking it away in a plastic box seemed to work, but only for a small amount of time. He needed to get some damn titanium. Alex crumpled up the paper into a more aerodynamically logical shape and touched the tip of the grime with it. An everyday ritual, a promise to himself and the particles of the Universe that he would weed this grease out and breathe freely without its molecules diffusing all the way into his lungs and nesting there like a team of colonisers. The paper started absorbing the barely wet compound. Alex lied on the floor trying to shed the sudden warmth in his body off. The floor was caked in microscopic particles of dead skin, fabric and hair, clinging to the wide surface area of his cheek and allowing his hair to sweep it like a mop, creating an additional layer of heat trapper protecting Alex’s thick skin from the stone floor, but it couldn’t withstand his whole weight. Dust puffed and escaped his sack-like figure from all sides, leaving a tiny membrane between the organism and the enslaved mineral. Alex wished he could already clean it without battling the disgust of slamming his body onto a clearly dirty floor – or wished he would just decompose faster than a tennessine atom and never exist in a living breathing form again. However, he was too stable – and that was just right. Alex was waiting to crawl back into his worker uniform which have him an illusion of comfort and bigger stability even though it was a lie deep on the subatomic level and the stability of his widespread atoms and their protons and the quarks which were their building blocks was exactly the same. He was a building block. He imagined an arrow drawn from him to the floor, labelled carefully. The world was labelled ever since he saw how it was done from the first physics book he has ever held in his hands – labelled and annotated as if he wore a headset which drew these annotations for him. But he could almost really see them, the forces that the arrows represented were the realest thing in the world and have always been. The dust seemed more comfortable than his breaking bed and definitely much more stable, suitable for a man of stability. Alex could not decompose and decay just now because there was one thing to decay before he could that he should see.
The proton.