925 miles | z.m. au

x.

“Help, I’m alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer”

—Metric

...

The beeping is hauntingly familiar and Mary wonders how she managed to imprint the sound of it into her brain when she’s forgotten so much. She squeezes her eyes shut tighter than they already are and wiggles her fingers—making sure they’re still connected to her brain, her brain is still connected to them. She opens her eyes and it’s more like peeling them apart, really—glued together with sleep and Mary wonders just how long she’s been here.

The room is white and Mary wonders if there are hospital rooms that are painted any other colour—any colour at all, really. But she supposes it makes sense—hospitals are supposed to heal your body and clear your head and keep your imagination caged up until you’re better. Mary has always hated hospitals.

And she knows her dad would tell her not to do it—pull the tubes out of her wrist. Even her grandma, who encouraged her to climb mountains and swim with sea monsters and jump from the sky, would tell her not to do it. But once in a while Mary thinks it’s alright to be stupid. It’s alright to give into what you want rather than what you need, and isn’t the line between them vague anyway? It must be.

Mary is tired and still a little dizzy but her mind is working half the speed it normally does, so maybe she’s been awake for longer than she thinks. Never mind the time. Never mind the days or hours or minutes she’s been lying in this hospital bed. Never mind the fact that she should remain in this hospital bed. She needs to leave, and she prays to God or The Universe that the nurses have not learned her name. See, there are millions of Marys scattered across the country—perhaps hundreds who are the same age as her with the same colour eyes—but her brain is one-of-a-kind and she can’t risk them finding out. She can’t risk nurturing nurses and pitiful stares and the worried arrival of her father.

Mary cannot be found.

So she checks the clipboard hanging on the end of her bed and sighs and thanks God or The Universe for letting her catch a break. According to the sheet, her name is ‘unknown’ and perhaps it is here, too. Mary would love to continue roaming the earth as a nameless collection of cells—she could blend into the dust and the sky and the tar of the highway and pretend that she has a chameleon soul. She could reach out her fingertips and not worry about the prints at the end—not worry about leaving a trail of them across filthy bar tops and around wavering, abused microphones. She could scour the world and not leave a single living cell in her path. She would be nameless and no point of reference would ever hold her. The world would skim over something without a proper title or social standing the way it always does.

No one would know her name.

Zayn would not know her name. And maybe then Mary would not feel an attachment to the steadiness of his heart or the lingering fingerprints that have embedded themselves in the coding of her spine.

Mary strips herself of the hospital gown in the middle of the linoleum floor and digs her clothes from the plastic bag at the end of her bed. They smell like lemon and she sends out a silent ‘thank you’ to whichever nurse was kind enough to care about a girl wearing dirty jeans on the street.

She shrugs into Zayn’s jacket and pretends not to care about the implications before heading off. Taking back to the streets and the dirt and whatever state she’s landed herself in this time. And she’s not in trouble—she’s not. She’s been in worse situations than this.

And, yeah, when Mary thinks about it, she realizes that she has no idea how she ended up in the hospital in the first place. She was on the street...she was on the street. What was she doing there? It’s maddening having empty gaps in her memory.