We’ll forever be suspended in this single moment in time.

Headlights flash, disappearing and reappearing.

It isn't that the cars are flashing in and out of awareness.

It's more the fact that you are completely and utterly separated from your body, and any sense of reality seems to have chosen to attach itself to your body rather than your mind.

You can smell the sweetness of the liquid in the bottle in the hands that you aren't particularly sure are yours. A twitch that you think might be your nose wrinkling sends your body into fits of laughter, while you yourself also seem to find it inordinately funny.

Time seems so irrelevant that you think this particular moment has stretched out forever.

You certainly can't manage to remember a time before and comprehending a time afterwards seems quite beyond you, really.

Why would there ever be another moment when this one will do?

(I’m quite happy where I am in this moment thank you)

It isn't a conscious decision to lift the bottle to your lips and drink. You only realise you're doing it when a trickle of liquid winds it's way from the corner of your mouth to the tip of your chin, and pauses there, almost as though waiting for something.

Your head tilts to the side, and a bright flash sends you toppling backwards, the trickle of liquid quickly and easily forgotten. Laughter seems the only natural response, the response that is spilling from the lips and mouths and whatever else around you, and who be you to behave unnaturally?

Absently, you wonder if this is all occurring within the same moment. You really aren't sure, but you think a moment is only around sixty seconds, and surely sixty seconds has already passed?

You look up to the sky and see the same stars twinkling, the same moon overseeing it all, and the same headlights flashing.

(are they really the same?)

Surely it is still the same moment.

You're oddly empty of thoughts briefly, for no particular reason.

(silence between your ears)

You hear laughter again, and it is ridiculously difficult to bring your focus to bear on the vicinity the laughter came from.

Not even effort can conquer this, it seems, and you settle for a point somewhere to the left. A quiet contentment surrounds you, creeping closer until it seems to be a second skin. Laughter bubbles from you as an almost unconscious reaction.

Soon, the laughter fades, the quiet prevails and the silence feels like the only thing you've ever known. Laughter seems distant, but that quiet contentment still hugs you like a second skin.

The thought of contentment as a jolly, fat fellow with a large nose and a yellow waistcoat wrapping you in a hug would normally be enough to send you into raucous hysterics.

(is yellow the colour of contentment?)

You cock your head in thought. Oddly enough, even the thought of the jolly fat man called 'contentment' doesn't seem to dislodge the silence between your ears. It just provides a soft sort of amusement.

You wonder if amusement can be soft. You wonder if amusement can be anything except amusing?

The train of thought trails off into nothingness and the quiet settles in again.

Soon, yellow is all you can see. It takes an expenditure of will and thought you think has drained you completely to realise you've closed your eyes.

The fat, jolly, yellow waistcoat-clad man with his large nose appears before your eyes and you barely hear the snort of laughter that finally escapes you over the silence and the yellow.

(is the yellow alive?)

You think you’ve reconnected with your body. At least, you hope so. Your head seems to be resting on something slightly softer than the ground. One of your hands is loosely gripping a bottle, but you aren’t sure whether it’s your left or right.

The jolly yellow man laughs. His large nose crinkles, his cheeks go red and he morphs before your eyes, growing taller, thinner and now sporting light brown hair and bright blue eyes.

The sight stirs something in you and you reach out, not entirely sure why you feel nostalgic and wistful.

(stay like this please)

A snort of laughter shatters the scene in your head, and the jolly, fat man with the yellow waistcoat is back. You don’t know why, but you suddenly miss the morphed version. Your eyes zero in on the nose, with none of the ridiculous difficulty you encountered before.

It was the same nose.

You laugh, and it comes out sounding very much like the snort that broke the play in your mind.

Your head lolls back against whatever you’re leaning up against, and you blink.

The fat jolly man you know only as ‘contentment’ disappears from your eyes.

(can someone be in your eyes?)

(or something?)

The nostalgia and wistfulness is gone and you don’t remember it as the yellow overtakes everything again.

(yellow)