ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 12
Aching replaces adrenaline—or whatever it was that woke me,
off and on. I’m aware of the world in the way that you are when
you pull yourself out of a pool. Hazy from the water in your eyes,
light-headed from holding your breath, squinting at the too-sharp
sunlight.
But my neck is stiff, pulsing along with my head. My body is
wooden like a treehouse, tense and heavy: my stiff arms are the
walls, my lower back the floor. My legs, the rigid tree, ache badly,
too. I didn’t even think of moving them till now.
I can only tell I’m bruised when I shift on the bed. My body
whines at me, as though it thinks this whole debacle is my fault.
I don’t think to tell myself—that anxious devil whispering to me,
my aching body pulling for comfort, my pulsing head—that it isn’t.
Family meet me at the hospital. I get hugs, attention. Then: waiting. exhaustion. sleep.
Thirteen
The second time it happens, I panic. It’s different and the same: I
panic because I don’t know what’s happened, then I panic because I
start to remember. And the doctor comes, then the medication.
Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen
It’s never going to stop, is it?
Nineteen
4
Walking around campus, I freeze. That smell . . . what does that . . .
what is that? A bunch of vines. Why does it smell like seizures? How
can something smell like a seizure. . . and yet even more?
