layover

Socked in at a disenchanted port, he is overcome with a feeling like jet-lag for a trip he has yet to make. He feels as though he has been here before. He sits, blinkered, unwilling to move, unable to move, just outside the seeming present tense. He has been prone to such daydream spell as long as he can remember (sitting in the hot car with windows rolled up in the grocery store parking lot). The eyes settle on a thing--in the direction of a thing--though the eyes register nothing of import to the mind's current process and a doubling of vision occurs. The inner ear's pitch registers a just-audible shift. What is this? He has these grooves in his mind. Once in such a groove all else in the material world falls away bit by perceptible bit. Image-memory unplaceable to either context or source skitters teasingly across his conscious thought (moving across the land's face, a damp, lowlit living room, a long-ago attic space of family friends, a breathing porch screened-in from the rain). He wonders if he needs to eat more vitamins. He wonders if he may be anemic, or a touch narcoleptic. He wonders if he may be an empath. He wonders if he may be ill.