Do You Remember?

Chapter 3: Upside Down

(Attached is an AI generated image of what I imagine San Quellin to look like: tranquil, untouched, and beautiful. I wrote a lot of paragraphs just to get this image, man ohhhh man!)

Happy reading!~~

The hospital room buzzed with muted urgency. The overhead lights were dimmed, the hum of machines working in rhythm with Hollis's shallow breaths. The doctors had stabilized her after a frantic rush to address the pneumothorax—her collapsed lung—but the strain of it all had pushed her body too far.

Hollis hovered on the edge of consciousness, her mind a whirl of fleeting images and sensations. Faces above her blurred, voices echoed in the distance, but none of it made sense anymore. Her body was no longer her own, slipping from her control, fading away like a receding tide.

And then it happened—the slow, suffocating pull of the blackness, pulling her under completely.

There was no pain here. No noise. Just an empty stillness. The world she knew had disappeared, swallowed up by a dark, endless void. Hollis felt like she was floating, suspended in nothingness. Her body didn't feel like hers, and the weight of her confusion only pressed in harder, but she couldn't grasp it—couldn't touch the chaos brewing somewhere beneath the surface.

There were flashes of light sometimes—fleeting bursts of sound that cracked through the black, leaving her with brief and fragmented thoughts. She couldn't understand them. She couldn't hold onto anything long enough to know where she was, why she was there, or how much time was slipping away from her.

Her parents. She tried to think of them, but every time she reached for their faces, their voices, they disappeared. The harder she tried, the more the memories faded. Everything was crumbling, and she couldn't stop it.

The world came back slowly, like dawn creeping over a quiet horizon.

First, there was a faint sensation—pressure against her skin—then the sound of a soft, repetitive beep. It pierced the thick fog clouding her mind, pulling her up, inch by inch, out of the abyss. Hollis felt her eyelids twitch, a heaviness weighing them down as she struggled to pry them open. The soft hum of machines returned, a steady rhythm she couldn't place, but it felt familiar.

She blinked slowly, her vision blurry. The ceiling above her was plain, off-white, and unfamiliar. Her mind, still sluggish, tried to connect where she was with why she was here. Everything was hazy. Her body didn't feel like hers.

Hollis swallowed, the act painful and foreign. Her throat felt raw, dry, as though she hadn't spoken in a long time. She tried to shift, but her limbs were heavy, weak. She didn't even know if she had moved at all.

Her chest... there was pain there, a dull ache that throbbed with each shallow breath she took. But worse than the pain was the confusion—the suffocating disorientation pressing down on her, making everything feel wrong.

Where am I?

The question formed, but no sound came out. Her lips parted, but her voice was a ghost, lost in the sterile air of the hospital room.

She blinked again, her vision clearing just enough to make out the faint shapes of machines beside her bed—monitors, IV lines, wires tethering her to the world around her. Slowly, slowly, the pieces began to fall into place.

A hospital.

But why?

The door creaked softly, and in the next moment, a figure stepped inside. He was wearing scrubs—blue and loose-fitting—his footsteps light as he crossed the room. The man, a nurse, moved with the casual ease of someone who had done this a thousand times. He didn't notice her at first, checking the machines, adjusting the lines feeding into her arm.