The Edge of Reality

Chapter 20: Reluctant Survivor

I felt as though I were waking up from a long sleep when I opened my eyes. I felt refreshed and new, and for a moment I couldn't place what had happened beforehand. My surroundings were stark white, and bright lights filled the sky. My vision was hazy so I couldn't see very well, but the landscape was filled with... nothing. I blinked several times in an attempt to clear my vision. I couldn't feel the rest of my body, and for all I knew it wasn't there at all. A shadowed figure approached me and slowly came into view. It looked like... Uma.

"Uma?" I said slowly and quietly, my voice breaking. My throat was so dry.

"Tesha, you're awake," she said, her voice flooding with relief. "It's okay honey, you're okay."

"Am I dead?" I asked her. It had taken her so long to walk over to me, but she was by my side now and had placed her hand over mine. I looked down to see that I did indeed have a physical body and it was reclined on a bed of some sort. Inches away from her hand were long white bandages wrapped around my arm- no, around both my arms and my right hand along with an IV. They were stained red. Feeling rushed into my nerves with her touch, and started awakening my other senses. Physical pain. Then emotional.

"No sweetie," she said. "You're safe." My eyes focused on her face and I had never seen her look so concerned. The rest of the room began to clear, and I realized I was in a hospital. I mentally cursed. This isn't what I wanted. I started crying at the shock, and she quickly sat down on the bed and rubbed my shoulder.

"It's okay Tesha, you're going to be fine," she said, voice breaking. "We found you on the street... and just in time." I tried to raise my hands to cover my face, but the pain was so much they dropped back down to my sides involuntarily. "I'm going to go find you a nurse, you must be in so much pain, I'm so sorry honey." She rushed out of the room, looking around frantically. I told myself to stop crying, there was no use in that. She looked so relieved that I had woken up, and even though I felt just the opposite I wouldn't tell her that; I'd had no idea how much she cared.

Uma rushed back into the room with a nurse and a doctor.

"Glad to see you're back with us," the doctor said soothingly as the nurse started checking my vitals. She attached something to my IV tube, and noticed the confusion on my face.

"This will help with the pain," she said. "Don't worry." The doctor was talking, but nothing she was saying struck me as important as I feel an eerie calmness flow through me. Euphoria lifted my head above my body as though on a cloud, and for a moment everything felt okay. I could remember in clarity what had happened the night before. None of it made sense to me yet, but in that moment I was okay with it. Maybe it would make sense another day. In fact, maybe it didn't even happen at all. There was a chance I was so miserable that I just tried to kill myself- wasn't that partially what happened anyway?

"-so I think those will be best for you," the doctor was saying, writing something on her clipboard. I snapped back to the present.

"I'm sorry, what was that?" I asked, embarrassed until I realized that I'd almost died so I had an excuse to not give a heck.

"I'm prescribing you oxycodone to help with the pain. You have a lot of nerve and muscle damage, so you're really going to appreciate having it even after your wounds heal."

"Don't you think oxy would be a little extreme?" Uma said from a chair behind them.

"What she just went through is a little extreme," the doctor said, without looking up. "We're going to keep you here for a few days, but you should be good to go after that."

I was secretly thankful for the extended stay. A white room with a bed wasn't my favorite place, but I preferred it to having to go back to functioning in the outside world. Uma hesitantly left after a little while, promising to visit again the next day, and I was left alone with my thoughts and the painkillers. I tried to drown out the loudness of my mind with TV, but I was so relaxed that I couldn't focus on the glowing rectangle and my thoughts ended up drowning IT out. I realized I had been shutting all the unpleasantness out, even while it was happening. I'd lost everyone who was close to me and even though I always thought we would work it out, day by day they were all getting further. Camm, Dwyer, Mara, Des, Tahki- they were all dead. Lela and Mareo seemed a thousand miles away and who knows what Eloy was doing.

Murtvika. It had been years since the last time I saw her- or was it only one? Monohan, Agni, Astrio- all dead because of me. I could still hear Astrio saying "you're not my sister anymore," in the back of my mind. As I let myself think about all of them, individually and together, I understood why I usually pushed them out. It stirred up old pain to process memories and I was becoming extremely nostalgic as I had more things to look back on. Every time the emotional pain swelled up, I called for a nurse and asked for more drugs.

"I'm in pain," I would always say, not disclosing the type of pain. It was a solution for all types of injuries and I took full advantage of it. The most painful, and unfortunately pressing, was the memory of what happened with Tahki and Des. I couldn't make any sense of it- Tahki had asked me for space and then gone around and blamed me on ignoring her. Maybe I should have tried to text her more or made some other effort to reach out, but she even stopped responding to my messages after a time. As far as Des... I had no idea what happened with her. I got a really uncomfortable feeling from her in the weeks after the breakup and even a little bit before. But there was no explanation for what had happened in the end. As my former best friend, she never reached out to me to offer me a word of comfort, even as we were living in the same apartment. She hadn't even acknowledged that anything was different to me- I would have appreciated even her chastisement or anger expressed to me if it meant she would be transparent. Was it my fault? Should I have tried to talk to her about it? Probably, but even a day after it was far too late. Even the night it happened, the closed off look in her eyes had said it would have been too late to reconcile there as well. Oh gosh, that night. I lashed out at her with such anger- I very seldom got angry too. Aside from the one doing the dirty work, she wasn't even the one verbally attacking me. Tahki had been emotionally unstable though, in some odd way it made sense for her to do that, as nasty as it was. Des had never been anything but sisterly to me from the first day we met, though. I had trusted her. I had trusted all of them.... But Mareo had trusted me and look what I did. I deserved to be cooped up in a hospital bed, slowing getting addicted to strong drugs. I didn't deserve to die- no, that wouldn't be bad enough. Death would be a sweet release from the weights constantly being added to my baggage. I didn't want to suffer, but I guess I deserved to.