From Ash to Fire

Two

"Ardently do today what must be done. Who knows? Tomorrow, death comes."

N

I always thought that tragedy happened quickly, right before your eyes with no time to react until after. It didn't take long for me to see how wrong I was. That, sometimes, it's the slowest burn you'll ever get. It'll heat your heart and slow cook your soul. It'll wait until you feel like giving up because day after day feels meaningless. When there's no purpose left, those that surround you will speak the classic words of encouragement.

Maybe they saw something in me I couldn't.

Because the fight was over as soon as it started. The doctors never kept that a secret. Neither the nurses who would let me cry when I had those few short hours alone to let it all out.

My parents and siblings were all in denial.

I try remembering their last words to me before the blackness engulfed the hospital room. It was something sweet and wishful that I grasped to when the noisy world vacuum sealed shut around me. The always persistent voice in my mind echoed the one phrase over and over. I remember it. It's somewhere in there.

I just have to remember it..

"Woah." The gurgle of a groan was all that I could manage when the landscape washed beneath my feet. Slowly, like a painting still in progress the waves crashed into my bare toes. The water felt weightless as it lured me deeper into its black depths. A singing song tugged me to gaze at my fate.

The gloom of the world was still there. Though, I remember the sky being a brighter shade of blue and highlighted by the blazing sun that I could feel on my skin. Here, everything seemed stuck. Clouds above, that sat in plain gray skies, were just a puff of smoke never moving from their intended spot. No longer did rays of light break through them to shine on the water's surface. The deepness became its first mystery in its murky distance.

There was nothing for as far as I could manage to see in the growing thick fog ahead.

"Hello?!" I yelled out with a foreign voice that I could barely recognize as my own.

Was it mine? How long has it been since I could speak freely? Where a tube wasn't forcing oxygen into my lungs? How many days had it been since I could move my fingers on command?

And where the fuck was I?

"Just over here. Come closer Dear."

"Well, I definitely did not say that." I whispered in response to the gruff, raspy voice that called to me. The tone was playful and, deep down, I felt it would be at my dispense that it was so.

Normal instinct would tell me to run from it but this world felt different in more ways than one.

"That's it. Don't quit."

I hadn't even noticed I was walking. There was no sound besides the hum of the lively voice. The waves were silent. Wind was nonexistent. The sand between my toes was imaginary; everything was in sight but nothing else. Even breathing felt pointless in the wasteland I had been banished to when my lungs wouldn't fill with air.