Second [Sunset]

None of my senses had been muddled by the lashes of sleep, but my eyes still struggled to adjust, even as the warm shades of porcelain drew closer to my nose, its breath against the tiny bristles on my philtrum, a sensation that was ticklish and bizarre, maybe because it was the first true sensation of being physically present I had been exposed to since waking.
Just at that moment, like it had opened the floodgates, a warmth seeped against my messy strands of hair, and the softness of the linen quilts rubbed against my arms and legs. 
My forehead felt the long bangs that clung to it drift to the side, and my eyes soon become fixated and clearsighted. 
"You're awake? That's good. What's your name?"
My name, huh? Such a difficult question, right after I've regained my senses. Well, it's not like she knew how difficult such a simple request was for me.
"I don't know" was the generic line that slipped from my dry lips, but what else could I have said. It was true, I didn't really know, and besides, something about this woman egged me towards sincerity. Maybe it's her motherly tone, and the fact that, as the first person my eyes lay on once opened, she really was kind of like a mother to this new me.
"Well, we'll just have to give you one."
Besides carrying for painful months on end, she was fulfilling the role of my mother.
But, even for something as simple as a name, I didn't want to burst out of the womb of sleep relying on her for every step forward.
Beginning a new life, or I suppose, extending on to a past life, I would become a virtuous, respectable person.
Her almond curls were curtained over her forehead, and to her sides draped long tails that clung at her chest, where a marble white dress with frills tucked itself behind the lined, deep shamrock wool of an open-chested sweater. 
"Perhaps one befitting your attachment to my chest?"
...so much for being reborn into virtuosity.
"I'm- I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... I'm still a little dazed, and so-"
"Don't get so caught up on my teasing. What do I care if you stare a little? That's what it's there for."
How kind! To be so reasonable to a guy you've had to comfort and care for while he slept carefree in such a lavishly fitted bedroom, not to mention slathering his gaze on to you the moment he wakes from serenity...
It's true that nothing of the sort was running through my mind, but I still felt a little guilty at my inability to tear my senses from her characteristics.
"But, what do we do for a name?"
A name, huh? Well, I certainly wanted to stop relying on her so much, so this was my responsibility. Rather, considering that name-picking was a menial task, it was less about her effort, and more about not wanting her to become more a mother than she already was. If I let her continue to pamper and guide me like this, I would never break free from my reliance on her. 
I didn't want to burden such a kind woman with something like that.
"Ruhm" burst quickly and quietly from my cracked lips.
"Ruhm?"
"Ah, yeah, I suppose it means something to me, because it just blew out unconsciously" I admitted, scratching my dishevelled hair with embarrassment and confusion.
But that brought me to another pertinent question, and still a little used to the murky serenity of sleep, I hurried it out into the world with little regard for manners.
"Do you know why I can't remember anything? Uh, sorry, I rushed into that" drawled out into a mumble of incredible shame. I wanted to look capable, I wanted her to see me as somebody she didn't have to coddle, but I was already making such lame excuses. 
Death might be a cure for stupidity, but it seems like being pathetic is something that carries on through the afterlife and out the other end. 
"It's understandable. I would probably think less of you if you didn't hurry into those kinds of questions, since it would probably mean you're naturally careless. People's natures are at their clearest in moments like just waking up after a deep sleep."
"I can see that. Well, I can feel that right now. I feel like every word, every unconscious movement of my cheeks and twitch of my eyelids are betraying my nature."
"Well, that can't be helped. You should at least be comforted by the fact that you're naturally quite a good person."
Did she know that for a fact? The way she spoke certainly gave that impression. 
"Now, Ruhm, you should get dressed. I'll answer your questions later" came soft words that lay on my ears and eyes like cotton, and her shadowy carmine irises looked at me with compassion. 
That was enough to jolt me into a full state of wakefulness, and I followed her orders, throwing off the bumpy patterned quilts and heading towards the closet she pointed towards as she stepped out of the room. 
Not able to notice from my position in the bed, I turned to look out the window, expecting some beautiful kind of scenery, with trees and vivid shades of green leaves, maybe even the calm turquoise of a clear sky, but I was met with a landscape that jolted me into apprehension.
That is, there was no landscape to meet my eye, discounting the islands of dark grey swirls that mixed in with the garish silver and white glare that permeated the entire atmosphere, there scattered and stretched bodies resembling galaxies filmed in monochrome.
Most of the surprise was instinctual, bubbling and popping from inside my flesh and bones, the remnants of common sense that once clung to this body, to the previous world of mine, whatever it was. My brain, my sensibilities, were somehow still oriented to the expectations of picturesque shapes and colours, even if I didn't understand why, but the strongest emotion of despair radiated out from my beating heart, pumping its sadness and anxiety into circulation.

After I had dressed in a generic, white dress shirt, almost identical to the woman's minus the extensive frills, and a pair of baggy, black, cotton or linen pants, with a darkish, jade coloured jacket unzipped at the chest hanging a little low over my waist, I placed my palm around the faded golden doorknob. 
Before I left, I wanted to get my bearings a little more.
Like a visual adventure game where you want to interact with everything in the room before moving on to the next, I wanted to take a look at what kind of place I had been dozing carelessly in, and awoken with no memories, like a baby born far too late to be ignorant of the world it emerged in.
Walls of a comforting walnut brown, the kind found in old English mansions refurbished to look good for tourists, enclosed the actually pretty large space that the bed occupied, and on the one side a slightly brighter shade of oak had been carved into a place for a lamp to hang beside the bead head, and on the other, a bedside table was littered with a strange assortment of small envelopes and pens, like somebody had been furiously writing a letter they just couldn't be satisfied with, and kept throwing the scrapped paper aside until they settled on something. As I neared, however, I realised that none of the letters, scrapped or not, remained, and only the envelopes had piled up to the side, while the scraps of paper were really just scrawls or sketches of some kind.
It looked like the kinds of doodles you make while on the phone to somebody, and you feel like fiddling with your fingers just for something to do, but there were no phones hanging on the walls, and I doubted mobile phones could exist in such an archaic looking place. 
While I wandered I looked out for any kinds of outlets, but it seemed that electricity wasn't in use here either, which is probably why they had the lamp dangling from the bedside, and the impressive chandelier whose regal silver design I had only just noticed glinting against the white shafts of light.
Everything else was pretty ordinary and didn't tell me much I couldn't already figure out.
There was an impressively sized desk with some neat little engravings on its sides pushed up against one of the walls, and a scattered layout of broad-leafed plants engulfed the room in a pleasant atmosphere that reminded me a little of something that I couldn't quite pull out from the dusty old library of my brain.
But something else itched at that locked-away bundle of gray matter with much more intensity than the room's decor, and it begun to flare up uncomfortably when I approached the proud-looking visage of a blonde-haired woman with extensive and impressive coils of pale gold hanging down below her chest. 
What kind of person was she, to have as professionally painted a portrait as this? Rather, to have a portrait at all, I guess. It seemed like a lot of the sensibilities of this new world were rooted in some kind of royal, archaic logic, so to have a gold-framed portrait hanging in a room like this must mean some considerable wealth or influence.
But I suppose none of that really matters all that much to me. 
That irritation in my thoughts is probably not because I'm attracted or intrigued by it, but more so, it must be rooted in my past in some undecipherable way that binds me to it, like invisible threads of crimson drawn up between me and the woman's visage, knitted across time and space.
Conscious of keeping the kind lady waiting, I hurried over to where she had been seated in the velvet scarlet of a cushioned chair, likely dragged over towards the bed from the far edge of the room, which lowered itself into a kind of rectangular outcrop housing a similarly crimson couch and a table littered with crinkled bits of opaque paper and empty, glittering plates.
There was nothing left behind, save a heavy crease in the cushion that sent a pang of guilt into my sorrowful heart. I wonder how long she had been waiting for this stupidly dreaming excuse for a human to wake up.
Though it only made me feel way more guilty, like the floodgates were bursting with every new thump in my chest, I wanted to figure out who this lady was, why she was here, and what she hoped to gain from me, but there was really nothing here that could give me any hint.
Especially in a situation like this, I can't believe that she would be doing this out of altruism or kindness.
Just then, another possibility opened up to me.
Was she related to me somehow?
Maybe she really was my mother after all?
Her eye colour was the same kind of shadow-laced, but otherwise burning ocean of colour that mine were, however where hers were crimson, mine were a strange sort of jade.
"Are you okay in there? Those clothes should be to your liking, I hope" accompanied a series of gentle knocks at the dark oak door, and the loose doorknob rattled a little under the pressure.
"Yeah, sorry, I'm still not used to moving around yet."
My search, though pretty superficial and hindered by my lack of attunement to the waking world, had dug up nothing but more indiscernible dirt, the same dirt that my feet stood hesitantly on, and that sprawled across towards the horizon. If I had the time to return here, I would have to go about it more thoroughly, but for now, I could only make her wait so long, both out of practicality and my own guilty feelings. 
I placed my fingers around the doorknob once more, but didn't look back this time, and headed out confidently, if a little despairingly, into the unknown.
And it really was unknown.
Sure, a hallway is to be expected, but the extensive gallery of windows that rose up to the high ceiling imposed their grandeur on me with an extreme weight the moment I looked up.
Flooding the shadowy hallway with the same garish white, like the faded marble colour of an angel's tired descent, shafts of white illuminated the sheer irreconcilable length that made me weary with inertia.
This place I had woken into was growing to be extremely bizarre and, in a way, hauntingly beautiful. 
While I stepped into the threshold of this seemingly endless hallway, my gaze met the crimson sympathies of the woman who could very well be my mother, wife, sister, friend, acquaintance, a stranger glimpsed in the street, or completely unrelated to me whatsoever, but at least, she was here for me.
I chose to leave it at that, and as the white beams fell upon us, illuminating her in a dusty haze of monochrome light and shadow, I glimpsed a movement of the small wrinkles at the ridge of her nose, and her smile calmed my anxious thoughts.
No matter what I might say, what kind of image I might purport, or how I might slip a masked facade over my true face, it would be useless to try and hide the fear and anxiety coursing through me like heavy blood. 
Just at that moment, when this strange, claustrophobic world seemed to constrict until it was only me and this woman, a door, almost identical to the one I had just gingerly pushed open, sprang forward from a handful of rooms down the hall, and a man whose long curls dragged themselves across the floor, hanging down in waves of his broad shoulders, marched forward like a possessed warrior, then turned his sharp glare towards us, the jade in his eyes glinting underneath the moonlight.