There's a certain amount of serenity that can be found sitting in a darkened room. A room where the only light is what the window allows from the streetlight outside to spill across the floor and walls, so that everything is comfortably shadowed. The only sound is the muted sound of tires grinding over snow and asphalt. But there is also a certain amount of fear.

Looking around the room you see the pale mirror that your television screen has become. Depending on the angle of your approach different bits and pieces of your world make themselves seen in the screen behind your ghost. Probably the most realistic show appearing all week: welcome to The Shadow World.

There's no turning on lights or lighting candles when you sit at this hour of the morning, long after midnight and long before dawn, trying to look into the parts of your life lurking just beyond sight. They won't offer anything in the way of true illumination; that will have to come from somewhere else. Turn the lights on now and you'll be left with a flat, two-dimensional world lacking substance and your ability to see will be diminished.

Books, records, curios, and furniture blur together as indistinguishable lumps until you stand right on top of them. Even then their colour remains leached from them as the pallet is reduced to the variety offered by combinations of black and white, although even those distinctions are absent.

No, there is nothing clear-cut in your world when you have woken to be drawn into this place surely only a step removed from dreams. A part of you briefly wonders if you were to go back to the bedroom if you'd find your body asleep in your bed, curled up in a fetal position where you left it. Perhaps you don't check because you are afraid of what you might find there? Or is it that you aren't sure what you want to find there?

Wander around for a bit, unsure if you want to commit yourself to this faded reproduction of your life, pick up bits and pieces and see they are indeed solid in spite of appearances. You feel some bit of fear right now and retreat to the couch in an effort to regroup. There is something comfortably familiar about how rough it is against the skin of your thighs where your bathrobe has ridden up.

That and your feet rubbing the worn, low pile carpet or slapping on the cold tile are all that make you feel like you are present physically. You know you are here because you can see the shadows and hear the various noises of the apartment settling into itself.

You sit on the couch hunched forward, curled up protectively around yourself while lighting cigarette after cigarette. But instead of providing the comfort you seek in the nicotine and habit, their smoke only serves to add another layer of texture to the shadows and deepen the mystery.