Lately, Alice has been having many episodes of deep sleep with dizzy dreams which pulled her through just like in a storm, and she found herself sliding downwards and crushing every time onto a different floor; any floor her mischievous mind would through her on. If this was truly an action driven by bad will or bad luck, Alice would never know.

Someone, maybe even herself, could have been drawing cards from the complete set that she once was, just as Alice had told her the first time she met her.

She had said:

“ - I am not afraid of you, you are nothing but a deck of cards.”

Alice thought of it as a kind and nice remark and loved Alice for it; she smiled and gave her a big hug. Later on, reconsidering, she knew that this had been no courtesy statement; were it to be the real truth, the danger was just close by. Alice was on the edge of re-shuffle almost any day. Further more, every time a card would drop out of the deck, like it used to happen every time when dreaming, Alice would crash together with the card upon a different floor and stand up with her knees bleeding. Every second day then, she would feel dizzy when waking up, a complete stranger to the real world (she would forget about the 9 o’clock metro and the last bus which was leaving for work at 9:30) and she would always bare scars.

Last night Alice had dreamt that she was in love with a boy with beautiful big blue eyes. It felt weird, just as if this boy was a mystery to himself (a closed, circular circuit of a dark mind), like he was lunatic and no-one would touch out of fear that he might scratch, bite or kill and then they would end up either in a coffin or baring the same poison. They had told Alice: “Simply stay away. Don’t let him come near, even if he wants to.” Alice dreamt of herself running around a house with many rooms, all coming out one of another, and desperately locking every door to keep the monster away. She remembers exactly how she was carefully thinking how strong the lock of the room should be, in order for her to sleep next door to him and hear his breath while sleeping. She badly needed to know that he would once come at peace with whatever illness was devouring him, and, strangely, she had a sick curiosity about observing how the illness would develop and she felt that she could love the character he would become at any stage of it.

This whole set of actions kept Alice in constant check; she imagined a table of chess on which she would be running across, stumbling in her hair, being afraid to look away, and always trying to find the right move, though his square had never changed. He would always remain the fool, right on spot, where he was placed from the beginning; only his eyes threw burning wires across the squares. It was a bit creepy being placed on the same table, in the same system of checkers, knowing that he could eat u up in two jumps if he wanted two, never knowing when he would move, never trusting he’d never do that. For once, geometry could not be trusted!

Alice got too tired and scared and decided to jump when she reached one edge. She ripped her dress a bit in the silver metal lock of the chess board and got a scratch on her finger, but as soon as she felt earth under her feet she could hear the sound of the door crashing just as she was pulling it towards her. Then she locked it safe and ran away with a key almost half her arm. It was a gloomy day, one in which you cannot notice either when the sun rises or it sets, things where all silent, the roads where all straight, she found her house number easily under a street lamp, and everything turned back to normal..

Months had passed, and Alice could not stand the noise of the traffic, neither the little sounds that people moving around her house were doing while making coffee in the kitchen or crashing the doors of the two bathrooms. She was tired waking up every morning in a world that was already awake; it made her feel out of pace, always in need to speed up, to catch up, unable to hold still, always with a prescription for every day …so that, in the end, there wouldn’t be any actual brand new days or pages to fill in. She was living a book of instructions that was already written, orders she couldn’t re-invent, just miss them out, and then loose at a game she did not even know by hard.