It is here again.  I heard it.  Farther away this time.  Down the hall?  Why do i feel like the sound is in a hallway.  I was laying here on my back.  Always on my back.  I heard a knock.  Again a single knock.  It echoed down a long room, or a hallway of some kind.  The sound was bouncing in the quiet, and something like that seems so much deeper and significant when it is the only sound you hear.  I remember exactly what i was doing.  Normally this would have taken all my concentration.

I was noticing my fingers.  I could feel the edge of a nail catching on the sheets over my hands.  I had never noticed something like this before.  It seemed rough, like a nail was cut wrong, and the edge was sharp.  This gentle tugging of fabric against my nail.  Just enough of an annoyance that I can’t get it out of my mind.  Like a tiny splinter in your finger that keeps snagging against your pocket.  But this one was in my nail.  The thing that I can’t figure out is how the pressure against the sheets changed if my hands never move.  Did my hand move while i slept?  And how did my nail get a rough edge.  Were did that come from?  How did it get cut.

Then that knock.  That sound.  It sounded like a hand on wood, but my door doesn’t look like wood.  Are there more doors of materials that are different than mine.  Maybe mine is wood too and I just am not seeing it correctly.  It would be so much easier if i could stand and open the door.  See what lies beyond this place, see what is in the hallway at least.  See something beyond the walls and the ceiling.  To escape dreaming for a moment of movement and freedom.  Can a sound really die down.  Is the sound moved from the source into the objects it touches.  Slight vibrations shifting the outer layers of atoms, moving them slightly faster as they absorb the kinetic energy of the sound.

If the atoms of my walls speed up enough, maybe they will shatter away, or slowly dissolve into gas, or vibrate into nothingness.  I don’t know what would happen.  How many knocks would that take, how many hands on doors would it take till the walls themselves have enough energy to open up.

That nail though.  Is that something i can keep track of.  If i remember it today, but after waking don’t feel the pull of the sheet, does that mean my hand moved?  Does that mean someone moved the sheet?  Cleaned and trimmed my nails?  Removed the nails all together.  Would it be a sign that I am changing in this place, or that the place around me is changing and I can change with it.  The nail might be everything I need to change where I am, or at least move my hands.  I know that or the nail will pick at me, and i will feel the sheet pulling against me forever.