It started off like a silent whisper.
No
No
No!
No!!!
I have to get up!
I began screaming in my head.
I began to urge myself to get up. More than ever, from the depths of everything I have ever been and am.
I want to get up!
But the response I expected never came.
My body remained completely still. Unmoving, unfeeling, and dissociated from the rest of my being.
Regardless, the unwillingness refused to fade. I kept urging myself to get up. Over, and over, and over, and over again.
More time passed.
I had never stopped screaming in my head.
No!
No!
And like a mantra, it echoed in my head, every second, every moment, every breath.
And as more time passed, this time, instead of despair, I felt myself grow more unwilling, more eager, wanting to wake up, more than ever.
Because, as more time passed, I realised that I had found my purpose in this dark, lonely, forsaken place.
I want to live!
Someone, or something, had taken that away from me, and I wanted to live. In all the time I had spent alone in this place, I had discovered the purpose of life.
Maybe it was all a moment's desperation, wanting to recover something that had been taken from you, but, at least for now, I was satisfied with just that.
There might come a day when I would regret discovering this drive and will to live, or I might find a bigger, larger purpose for living.
But that is it, because all the better if I do, because now I know, if I never get to live to see what the future holds, I will definitely regret it even more.
In that moment. After what felt like a lifetime. I felt something.
Yes...
It started in my chest. The beating of my heart echoed in the silence, like a war drum, slowly at first, and then louder, faster, powerful.
And then I could feel the blood flowing in my veins, and that opened up the rest of my body, like opening the gates of a drum full of water.
I can feel my limbs!
Not long after, I could feel every part of my body.
I expected to feel happy, overjoyed, even when the break I had been waiting for came. But I did not.
The feeling of relief overwhelmed every other emotion that threatened to spill forth. I just felt relieved.
But what scared me the most was how calm I was. I felt like nothing else mattered, like I didn't care. For as long as I had myself, it would all be fine.
It was scary.
I felt like I had lost a very important part of myself in that dark place.
Now that I could feel, I knew that I was alive, but then came the next problem: I could neither move nor see.
But at least I can breathe and feel. I was clearly lying on my back, face up.
God, I have never been so grateful to be alive.
More time passed...
Now that my sense of feeling had returned, the passage of time became more grating to my mind.
It felt long, very long. The subtle feeling of the elements assaulting my body, and so telling me what time of day it was.
The hint of cold, obviously representing nighttime, and the heat, daytime, that is, unless I was in a very place that did not have extremely varying highs and lows for temperature.
I was heavily inclined to believe I was in an environment that had normal temperature variations for day and night.
But the most important, maybe relieving piece of information I put together was the comfort underneath me.
I'm lying on a bed. That's good.
The bed was comfortable, more comfortable than the beds I remembered. As time passed slowly. Sometimes, I would feel someone wiping my body, probably to keep me clean.
It felt weird at first, but it wasn't like I could do anything about it. What was even more weird was how I was conscious mentally, and yet unable to move a muscle, hear a thing, or talk.
More time passed...
Having kept track of the time this time around since I could 'feel', two weeks had passed and...
One day, as I was simply lying on my back as usual, waiting for some sort of change, I saw a light in my dark vision, soft and subtle at first, and growing brighter every second, until it became constant and unchanging.
My best bet was that I had regained my eyesight, but that was about all I could gather, because I could not move my eyelids. But it was reassuring to know I could still see.
But from this, I concluded that my body was 'waking' up bit by bit, if I could call it that. Which meant, sooner or later, I would be able to move.
Hopefully not organ by organ. Hehe. I thought.
I found myself laughing inwardly at my own joke, Organ by organ, he says. A moment later, I thought about how crazy that sounded; regardless, I felt the urge to laugh again.
Great, apart from being trapped in my own consciousness for an eternity, I've become a madman.
After another day passed, my eyelids began to flutter, and that meant I would be able to see soon, and I was proved right later in the day.
I opened my eyes wide, and I was met with a board of some sort over me. A canopy bed? I managed to make it out from the little I had in my field of vision.
I scowled, frowning at the unexpected development.
I mean, who uses a canopy bed in this day in age, and in a hospital, am I even in a hospital though?And, I can frown now. That's new. Can I speak?
I tried to move my lips and throat muscles, but moving my lips was about all I managed, that, and a low groan.
So, I closed my eyes. I hoped the person who cleans me up would come soon. And so, I waited. Surely, I should be able to move soon.
Which reminded me, it doesn't feel like I had any sort of clothing on my person at the moment, apart from some sort of shorts I could feel.
Great, now I'm a naked, crazy boy.
"Hahahahah...Eekh..haha...!!!"
And like that, without even realising it, I began to laugh out loud, genuinely. It sounded dry, primal, and deprived, not that I cared.
That's weird, I can make sounds now, and I can hear.
The next thing I felt was my limbs becoming responsive, slowly, very slowly. The best way to describe the sensation was your cold body gradually becoming warm, from the core, outwards in a radius.
"It's good to be alive..."
And like that, I found myself trying to get up.