Thereafter, a home

I slept fitfully last night, though I was not plagued by any dreams. Instead there was a certain lulling distraction in my mind, the kind of sensation one has when something is left undone but the particulars continue to elude the mind.

My cubicle is not so generous as the cells which we prophetics are afforded in the desert. Here, three strides takes me from the loosely-hinged entryway to the back wall, which is blocked by a cot, comfortable enough for one but which would not permit any shared rest with another body. The elsewise length is two strides deeper, these two borders completed by a shutterless window opposite a kitchenette with one burner and an cubic icebox about an arm's length in each dimension. I do have a bathroom, though bathing will be done, somehow, using only the sink therein, which is the only sink in the cubicle. I have heard from my neighbors, who ruminate more than they speak, that these places were once called apartments until the gradual reduction in size seemed too absurd even for the landlords to claim, thus adopting the term cubicle, which was itself once reserved for the lifeless office-boxes in which a day's work was done.

I have packed up my desert garbs; they are locked away in my canvas satchel, stowed at the bottom of the one very shallow closet permitted by this space, which is adjacent to the door. The walls are weather-stained: I don't believe the coming winter shall be terribly comfortable, but having entered the profession which has taken me to this place, I no longer maintain any pretense of desiring comfort.

I shall be a student while I am here. Though the education is a free and open system, it is not compulsory for any age, nor does it maintain any standard of content or quality. For this reason I may attend unnoticed.

This project shall certainly take longer than any of us had anticipated. I hope to detail the incidents of shockrot the next time I contact you all. It is a disease whose propensity to spread is entirely unknown and whose design and course is alarmingly arbitrary. Perhaps a pattern to the growing infections shall emerge.

Adabeie