The Last Conversation

001

Your room is dark. You cannot see anything. You are lying in a bed. A sheet covers your body. You wiggle your fingers and toes, and the loud rasp of skin rubbing against the sheets is startling. With the slight movements there is pain. Your muscles and joints hum with it.

You’ve been awake and not-awake for days, maybe weeks, perhaps longer. You do not know where you were then, or before then. You are here now. A significant amount of time has passed, but from what beginning you do not know. You consider the origin of this time during which you’ve been awake and not-awake and conclude it is, for the moment, unknowable.

You listen. You blink. You might see shapes within the darkness but you can’t be sure. Your breathing quickens and so too your heart rate. You are becoming more of yourself. You are confident in this; time is no longer your enemy, and the longer you remain awake, the longer you can stay you. You are buoyed and terrified by this thought.

You briefly drift and imagine a brightly lit room with a white ceiling, wooden floor, and yellow walls the color of a flower; you cannot yet think of the specific flower. You dismiss the random images and instead perseverate on your inexplicable dormancy. There is a sense of time having passed, however, which implies your consciousness had enough awareness within that missing time to be aware of itself. You were you, and you are now you.

You attempt to sit up, contracting your stomach muscles and pushing off the bed, your weight held up by elbows and hands. Sharp, electric pain splits you down the length of your spine and radiates into your tremulous limbs. You cry out. The pain is incapacitating, all-consuming, setting off white jagged flashes in your vision and then taking root inside your head. The pain is a giant wave that threatens to wash you away. You do know what a wave is but you cannot remember if you’ve experienced one firsthand.

You’re afraid to turn your head or to move at all. You’re afraid of the darkness, the utter lack. You’re afraid of receding, shrinking away to nothingness, to wherever you were before. You’re afraid you are caught in a loop: you’ll go away only to later wake again in blind agony, and then return to unconsciousness, and then wake to agony, again and again.

There is a mechanical blip, and the hum and whir of machinery. Warmth flows into the back of your left hand and up the length of your arm. Your consciousness recedes toward the singularity that you fear.

As you slide away, a voice that is not yours echoes through your nascent universe.

She says, “You will feel better. There will be less pain. I will take care of you. We will begin tomorrow. Get some rest.”