Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to Doug’s bloghop the Min-to-Min.

This week’s prompt:

The Dark Side of the Moon

1975

The third-floor apartment was nearly as devoid of furnishings as he remembered.

The bare wood floors, not the good kind that glow with polish, shamelessly begged for a coat of grey paint. The walls were the remembered horsehair plaster, rough-textured by time and neglect. The kitchen was the only unambiguous commitment to providing human habitation. In the harsh economy of limited space, the refrigerator stood, small and noisy, adjacent to the sole source of heat. A gas stove, it’s top consisted of four grease-crusted burners and an ashtray full of burnt wood matches. The feeling of common shabbiness startled the man, his initial romantic anticipation of a successful time-travel spell wilting painfully.

Without warning, he heard a line of dialogue from a forgotten movie: “This your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to...”

Stepping to the single bed occupying the center of room, kitchen table sacrificed to save on heating during the heartless winters, the man began to stroke and smooth a crumpled sheet of paper across the worn bedspread; a pair of reluctant lovers, resisting even as submitting. The symbols and words on it appeared and re-appeared between his fingers, initial ardor flagging until it could be read no more.

And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.