THE MAN WHO WOKE UP IN A CAMERA OBSCURA

The man had recently arrived to the city.

He rented a room on the first floor of an old house on a square.

He simply forgot the reason he had came for.

At night he fell wobbling on the bed and fainted into a frantic sleep.

Nevertheless he had always been a visionair. 

Now, every morning, the glass was waiting for him assidiously and at night it attended him to sleep.

 

He knew the map of the local bars but sometimes he just felt satisfied by restocking at the supermarket.

He locked himself up in his house and avoided any sort of company.

Whoever he met, resembled him too much and he felt like looking in a mirror without recognizing himself.

In his room he felt absolutely confident. He had spent so much time in it, that even when he was completely drunk he managed to move in it, without touching a thing.

Sometimes he challenged himself into a wild dance. The walls moved, they came closer and withdrew, but nothing ever fell. Nothing made noise. There was silence.

A detail 

The man was convinced he was losing his body.. He was becoming a phantom, with no power on things. 

He could pass beyond walls, without breaking them. It was the only possible explanation. 

While he was drifting he started gathering abandoned objects from the streets, to modify his room and verify if he would blunder on them. Nothing though.

During the day he drank and walked, and walked and drank.

He tried to get lost. He abandoned control. He gathered.

At night he came home with a big black bag full of things found on the street.

At home he emptied it slowly and started to assemble his sculptures.

The man stuck everything scrupulously together and created unthinkable columns, he danced wobbling between them to see if something in the room would fall.

But it never happened.
 

Every night a bit of the city came into his house, to the point it mystified and juxtaposed itself. 

He wondered about his past but was not able to regenerate his physical relation to things.

He was never sober enough to remember if he had always been like that or not.

His memory could not grasp any object. Only light visions.

One day an old man, who was taking his dog out on his usual walk, perceived him.

He stopped and stared at him.
 

First he was scared, then unbelieving.

The square got crowded. Everybody watched, everyone wanted to see

and stared at the lit window.

Time passed by, the man continued his light and abrupt dance. It looked like he would collapse or stumble but the objects seemed to withdraw and get out of his way. Nothing ever fell.

Balancing, like a ropedancer.

Women began to come down their balconies with their chairs, men lit their tobacco, somebody even started to take advantage by selling tickets for the show.

When the square was full of people, the man suddenly stopped, turned off the light, bowed to an imaginary audience,

locked the window and fainted on his bed. 

He fell asleep in an image of capsized phantoms.