You sit up in the bed before you’re even fully awake- consciousness hitting you like a physical thing. In rapid succession- the shock of awareness, dizziness, pain dancing across your body. You finally get around to being confused at about the same time you remove the heels of your hands from your eyes. You just barely part your eyelids, the sleep making the action feel unnatural and sticky. A groan involuntarily croaks out, your own voice sounding so unfamiliar it startles you, as though the noise came from someone else. If your eyes felt glued shut, then your mouth feels sewn shut. Like a wound sutured closed. The moister bits of your lips stick together as you experimentally stretch your face, like thin strips of skin recently healed over a wide cut. You wet your lips with your tongue and rub the sleep from your eyes with a balled fist.
Several moments pass as your long-absent consciousness sorts and puts names to the sensations that have come to greet you upon your awakening. Dizziness, fading fast. Pain, yes, but that is fading as well, dull and throbbing in time with your heart. Your heart, beating. Breath- your chest feels vacuous and demanding, your airways dry and raw after…
how long?
The question runs alongside the rest of your mind’s continued cataloguing. How long?
Hours? Weariness, even though you’ve just awakened. Itchiness, under your bandages on your chest, which calms marginally as you move your hand gently over it. Not hours. Days? You breathe deeply through your mouth in an attempt to calm your racing heart, and the first breath catches- too deep, carrying moisture into your lungs.
The coughing fit takes more than a minute to calm, though your perception of this time is stretched by the symphony of aches and pains it reveals across your body. At least the sharp bite of pain resolves your focus some, and your mind, helpfully, catalogues it all for you. Left foot, left shin, your hips… then across your body, your right shoulder, your right elbow isn’t moving right. None of that particularly matters to you at the moment, as the pain in your chest dominates it all- your vision swimming as the pain washes over you in waves with each new hitched breath.
The fit leaves you panting in shallow, uneven gasps as you struggle to catch your breath without lapsing into another fit. You’ve broken a sweat just coughing, and all the new aches you’ve discovered itch in a profound way that implies broken bones half-healed. Not days, then.
Weeks. Gods, weeks. Weeks since-
The jolt of adrenaline numbs your pain and stills even your struggling breathes as a chill wave washes its way down your body. Your mind: frozen, seized like broken gears.
Since…
Your mind refuses to move any further. But its there, you can feel it, just beyond your grasp. You can almost remember. You have it, it’s-
You look around, and like a miracle, beside the bed on the nightstand: a fountain pen and an un-tidy pile of paper. You snatch them up in trembling hands before it’s gone, you press the pen to the empty bottom of the topmost page and.
.
Nothing. There’s nothing there… except the sense of loss. You had it, you know you did. Even if you didn’t know what it was, you know it was THERE at the very least, but now… there’s just nothing. Emptiness collapses in on itself. Weeks where your consciousness went wondering while your body lay broken, and the weeks before that, too. The weeks where you… did what? You search your mind for the memories of what got you to where you are now and find nothing. Gods. There really is nothing there.
A slight movement of your tensed hand sends the beaded ink that was pooling below it splattering against your fingertips, staining the top of the page and the sheets beyond it.
No use.
You force yourself to gently lift the pen and replace it on the nightstand. A deep sigh, and a moment of rest for your eyes. Your hands idly finger the pages in your grasp. Several slow, deep breaths later help you regain a sense of calmness. You open your eyes once more. More out of instinct than curiosity, you turn the stack of pages over to see what it was you were writing on.
And there you find a book.
“I Will Plant a Lilac Tree in your Chest” – Collected Sayings of Cragaetus
The most whimsical work from famous nomad/philosopher Betsy Divans, this is a collection of unique sayings and idioms from every contemporary culture and people she visited. An extraordinary polyglot, Betsy has here rendered each phrase in its native language (where available) as well as translated it to common Stelien. She also records brief notes on its meaning, intended use, origin, as well as her own impression of it. While not as well known, this rare book is favored by her students and followers for it’s display of Betsy’s trademark wit. The book is densely written on small pages, and tightly bound in fine red leather. [Elizabet Divans, 117 pages, Non-fiction (Travelogue)]