"still life"

There were — moments, during that time. Flashes of awareness. My eyes were open the whole time, unblinking, unmoving, dead. And sometimes I could see out of them, like they were windows I passed as I wandered through an empty house.

Ceiling. White. I was still in the bathtub. Cool and dry. Someone had emptied it.

Phantom pains, sometimes. My right leg felt cramped, once, maybe twice. It took me a long and timeless moment to figure out what the feeling was — to remember that a “right leg” was something that I had, once.

Every now and then I could feel my whole body. Or I'd be aware that I couldn't feel it, all of it pins-and-needles numb, sensations just static, like a radio tuned to a station that went off the air a long time ago. I would feel suddenly trapped, paralyzed, unable to even move my eyes. And then I would remember I was dead and I would just let it go and forget about it, forget about being in a body. Going back to wandering the house behind my eyes.

Three days. Three days of this.

Three days of seeing a face, sometimes, hovering over me concerned and I would try to puzzle out when this happened, what memory this was, and then realize that this was happening now, that “now” was a concept that still somehow applied to me.

I never felt warm. I never felt cold. I felt like meat. That's what I was, a ghost wandering lost in a cooling pile of meat. There was meat and bone and gristle and it was all wrapped around me, confining and tight.

I wasn't really aware of myself any more, not as any one thing. I felt like three discrete sets of impulses, twitching their way around inside this dead skin. There was my mind, what I remembered as my mind, my set of memories, feeling lost and confused, not understanding how to play this game it thought it was done with.

There was something deeper than that, something more primal. Lizard brain, maybe, dim and primitive little knot of nerves at the base of the spine, frustrated and prowling, reaching out through my body and flicking switches, making connections, trying to get it all working again. That impulse that kept surveying the vast territory of my distant limbs, that kept prodding at my silent heart with a stick, trying to get it running again. I could feel strange things happening in my body at my lizard brain's request, feel unnatural repairs being made, odd bargains being struck between estranged organs. The upper part of my mind wanted to take flight, to be done with all this. But this lower mind was concerned with the business of living, or at least, surviving. It had too much invested in this body and the only dance it knew was to keep going, keep moving forward.

It made progress, of a kind, over the course of those three days.

Once when the face came back — it was the face of someone I'd known once, in those long ago distant days before I'd died, but I couldn't place it — when it came back and hovered over mine, my eyes jerked to track its movements. The face above mine smiled and was gone.

Somewhere inside I wondered if that other face was mine, too, if it belonged to me; if it was some distant part of my body I hadn't yet explored. I didn't have much concept of the face belonging to someone else. I had forgotten that there was anything but me in the whole dead world.

The face gone, my eyes stayed locked on its last position, and fell back into disuse and disrepair.

That third part of me —

That third part, I didn't know how to deal with. It was a stranger. It was Other. It had come from outside. But my lizard brain had entered into an alliance with it, and between the two of them they planned and rebuilt, they conspired to keep me trapped here with them.

This stranger burned and I could sometimes feel it burning. It was a harsh red light when the rest of me was dark, and I could feel it moving through me. It reached through my body to all my dead cells and talked to them, coaxed them.

It spoke to them of Blood, the lover who had abandoned them, who once brought them air and strength, making legendary journeys all the way to the heart and back. But Blood had left, draining out into the world.

It doesn't matter, the stranger would say, and my cells would gather close and listen as the stranger gave them some of his new strength. Strange new promises were being whispered from the empty chambers of my heart. There will be others, the stranger would say. You will be strong and loved again and there will be new Blood, enough to drown in if you will only trust me.

That was the message it carried through my body and my lizard brain heard and believed it as it made its travels and repairs and in my windowed room in my head I heard that voice and feared it as the stranger burned through my veins like a sickness, a sickness that brought strength.

Once, the ring finger of my left hand jumped and twitched as something was put right inside me, as new connections were being made. The effort felt like Atlas lifting the world and my body cried out for rest but the lizard and the stranger would not give up and would not let go.

Another time, my eyelid twitched, and my head turned a little. No one was there to see it.

Another time, my mind managed to put together a whole sentence, managed to remember words and string them together into something that made sense. I think I'm dying, was the sentence, and of course it was a message that came too late; the dying had already been over and done with quite a while before. But it was the last thought I'd been trying to think, just after I stopped breathing, and something in the back of my mind — one of my minds — had been working on the problem of crafting that thought ever since, and had finally figured out how to do it. The sentence sat alone in the center of my dead mind and echoed to itself with no one to think it. I think I'm dying. I think I'm dying.

Awareness came and went. Something like sleep came and went. Between those states, nothing. Sometimes sleep brought dreams. I don't remember them. I think I dreamed about you. I must have. I don't think I could have helped imagining, remembering, even in my fractured state, your hand reaching out to catch me.

Finally, on the third day, experimentally, tentatively, I took a breath. My lungs labored and filled, and the air felt wrong. It was like breathing in smoke. Too much.

I shuddered and blinked, startling the fly that had been crawling on my left eye. I bolted upright, sputtering and coughing, forcing the air back out of me, gasping for another breath and forcing it back out as well. Each breath was as useless as the last.

I thought I was drowning. My fractured points of view crystallized, snapped back into focus.  I.  I was drowning, choking on air.

Eventually I stopped panicking, stopped trying to force it, tried just holding my breath.

After a few minutes, I realized that another breath wasn't going to come. I lay back down against the cool porcelain.

I sat there for — I don't know how long, waiting to just let myself drift back down into non-awareness. Staring unblinking at nothing. I thought of my mom again and thought of all the times she'd nearly caught me reading in bed when I was little, my suddenly dark flashlight and book twin secrets under my quilt, and how I'd lie there and pretend to be asleep. I don't know if I ever really fooled her.

And I wasn't fooling myself, now. I had died, I knew that. I felt dead. But I could move again. And I could think.