A House Turned Sideways

My mind is like a house turned sideways.

Nothing inside the house has fallen: the chairs and tables, the appliances on the kitchen counter, the books inside their bookshelves.

And yet; the house is sideways and I am crouching on a window. Beneath me loom the dark, spiky shapes of an unknown backyard.

The sky is probably down there, perhaps a swimming pool, perhaps paving stones and outdoor furniture all maintaining its logical positions in space like the furniture inside the house; but I don’t know.

I try not to look down. I try not to think about the thickness of the glass beneath me. I try not to think about the thinness of the glass beneath me.

My mind is like a house turned sideways. And here I am, held up by a single pane of glass. To fall would be impossible, after all, one does not generally fall sideways. And yet, it is as though the gravity of this place is different for me compared to everything else.

The gravity.

If I move, does the glass vibrate beneath me. If I breathe? I should breathe and yet, my breaths come in shallow, anxious snatches. What if I inhale too deeply and become too heavy for the window to support? What if the glass breaks? What if I tumble out into that sideways-world, that sideways-sky?

There is perhaps a fence down there. A building. Another window. And yet I am certain that if this pane of glass were to break, none of these would catch me. This is my window. The window of my mind. And although I do not recognise it, this is my house turned sideways.

If I fall I will fall into the orbit of the earth and I will sweep through that sky like a satellite. The earth would no longer claim me. My mind would be at the whim of angular momentum, dragged along a separate linearity.

So I remain still. I inhale small breaths. The glass wobbles beneath me–or perhaps I merely imagine that. For the glass yet holds.

The glass does not break.