He'd return it to her.

He'd return that thing to her that she had given him. That pain in beauty that made only absence possible. That made only her, and the terrible, unbearable reality of her beauty possible; it was either her beauty or absence; the dream – for it was a dream, he realised now, living, drifting between tubes/between way stations – his life -

- The colours evaporated; life in this drifting mode. Consciousness was beneath, never on the surface, merely reacting, merely biological imperatives, emptying when the rhythms of the television tubes inculcated it. Performing the necessary actions of emptying your flesh that got you through one six hour block to return. To life. To living; to the dream.

The only way of living rendered impossible by a kind of flesh that soared.

Beauty.

Glancing back he was still behind him. Important for some reason he couldn't understand, glanced out; important for some reason he didn't at this moment understand, or recall, his entire mind eradicated, in that shaft of light off her.

He followed, without indicating it, without anyone knowing; without the implicit spies given anything outward that might prompt them to recognise it. He went on, seeing no colours still, merely knowing their jackets had the same - hue, the same corridor their destination, yet, a desperate need to return that – glance.

It was her beauty that had rendered this whole space even real. Had made him understand that.

On the horizon: Eight, flat, large, cuboids, corridor/television tubes; their current day residences. Then jumbled again; mixed among each other/unknowns, no relations - separate, completely separate and isolated. And in continual unceasing contact. Why? The monologue running through him had ceased, in some sense; he contained that desperate concept; he knew where she was.

He worked himself subconsciously close enough; not too close, not even seeing her now, merely knowing; self-consciously and in this fashion so that – it was only that the idea be expressed. It had to be. He had to get it out even in the last moment before that idea, and him, were completely eradicated. Because it was this.

Plain and tiny and not himself, he was consciously and purposefully reduced: nameless and rendered empty by purposeful manipulation. He felt who he was now. It wasn't merely her beauty, that awakened the world; revealed what it was, in a fashion he couldn't express except that it was real; this was his life and not the dream between.

Not the thing he consciously/wilfully, merely drifted towards.

Just follow everyone else to feed tube; just fall on the correct hole for shit, the correct hole for piss, the correct hole for semen, and after that final madness, for the semen hole, you were anyway finished and then you could sleep - and you would sleep.

Then the emptying, of every gland and organ that accompanied. This was purposeful. - There was a conscious mind behind this; minds, or how had that concept even entered that this was merely it; merely inevitable. The natural consequence of forces, vague forces, of the unfolding along natural forces of time - and the manner in which things naturally changed and - change that was toward, and – good.

Where had these ideas come from that he was only now exposing to conscious thought; those ideas beneath this, beneath everything, ideas, were they - why did he think they too were conscious entities, minds. And that he was a bucket to them.