UNconscious
People who walk out of my life, only to walk back in again.
I stand on a train platform, searching for my next destination.
A Starbucks cup with my name written on it.
A window seat.
Seven empty seats nearby.
The station master announces the train’s departure.
The scenery slides past.
As trains cross one another on different tracks, I wonder:
Which train is truly the one in motion?
The rolling wheels remind me of the wheels that pushed my hospital bed into the ICU.
One had to depart on schedule.
The other was racing against the golden hour of survival.
What they shared was urgency.
I returned to the same body, carrying a body that had lost too much blood.
The blood that left me spread across the hospital bed around me, then beyond it.
My phone lay in the pool of blood.
It seemed to be mourning with me.
I woke up a few times.
Made a few jokes with doctors and nurses.
Made a few jokes with friends.
Made a few jokes with family.
But my blood played a joke on me too.
I vomited blood.
It was the last thing I felt before closing my eyes.
That day,
dark clouds gathered outside the ICU windows.
Yet inside me flowed the blood of one stranger after another.
And I was still me.
The same blood type, different personalities.
The same color, perhaps different nationalities.
My hair grew a few more centimeters.
My life lost a few more minutes.
Breathing continued its cycle.
My consciousness remained suspended somewhere beyond reach.
Inside those blank memories,
inside that small hospital room,
the heart monitor, the ventilator, the IV lines, and the slow transfusions
kept me company in silence.
Time drifted away around me.
Nurses and doctors came and went,
their shifts replacing one another.
But I was an unknown variable.
I heard your voice.
But my eyelids were too heavy,
a weight I could not resist.
I asked you in a café,
“What would you like to drink?”
Then everything dissolved back into a blank screen.
Again and again.
Over and over.
How long had it been?
How much time had passed?
That day—
I couldn’t tell
what time it was,
whether it was sunny or raining,
or even what day of the week.
Your voice woke me.
My eyes flew open.
My heart pounded like one that had been forcibly restarted.
Your voice surrounded me like surround sound,
and in a single instant,
my consciousness returned from a parallel world.
My attending physician saw me wake abruptly.
He was startled too, and called for a nurse.
Before they began the examination,
he told me about you.
He told me I had called your name while unconscious.
He told me about the messages.
He told me the things I needed to know.
Then the “personal conversation” ended,
and the “medical examination” resumed.
I watched the numbers on the blood pressure monitor rise and fall.
As I listened to him talk about you,
it felt as though my body itself had become a lie detector.
How long had I been gone?
The film reel of my memory began to play again.
A wave of nausea and sorrow spread through my chest.
I lay in bed,
staring at a ceiling that must have been painted over countless times
to become so white
that it could almost convince someone they had arrived in heaven.
A strange longing pulled at me,
and consciously,
I drifted back toward that parallel world of unconsciousness.
Sometime later,
my phone vibrated.
I returned to my body once again.
The screen showed a message from you.
Outside, rain tapped against the window.
Inside, I heard your trembling, tear-choked voice.
I was so overwhelmed with sadness
that my reactions slowed.
“You owe me an explanation,” you said.
I knew.
Before the coma,
I was like a boy who said the opposite of what he truly felt to the girl he liked before going to sleep.
After waking up,
the girl had already figured out what had happened.
Yet I felt like a schoolboy standing outside the principal’s office,
called out and left speechless by my attending physician.
I kept staring at the SYS and DIA numbers on the blood pressure monitor,
and my pulse had already told the truth.
That's a powerful piece and sounds like quite the ordeal. Hoping you are feeling a little better now.
Really incredibly well-written.