Translucent

Here

An opal haze, with freckles that acted like shadows on a false surface, the speckles of marbling on a counter top with no mass. Movements like flashes of light as she moves tendons and muscles and bones, seeing all of these parts of her neat frame while simultaneously seeing her skin lie taunt over the top of them.  

Her hands acted like this, every time she arrived back in the land of the living. At least, that how she described it. She didn't have another analogy, especially after having to leave finishing school because of her... condition.

Gravity didn't affect her body until she was entirely 'back' in the real world. Gravity was a foreign concept when she wasn't 'back'when she was 'there'.

That's what everyone referred to it as.

There.

Wherever it was.

She was still phased in between the two realms, There and Home.

The space around her, the empty, endless space that was both thick like syrup and thin like a vacuum, began to become the world that she remembered, objects and architecture and things! Beautiful, physical things.

She was phasing back, finally, after what seemed like an eternity trapped in limbo. Her hands were becoming hands, real and tangible hands. Her body was becoming a real and tangible figure in a real and tangible world and if she could have sighed in relief in that moment, she would.

Her body was becoming more physical, the skin thickening and covering her flesh after so long of being translucent. If she could have cried at that moment, she would have. But the moment passed as she realised that she hadn't used her legs in a while, gravity becoming increasingly more present on her fragile limbs.

She was almost back and she was teetering on the precipice of having a physical presence, her bedroom visible to her but still cloudy and blurred by her new physical vision. In the way that she hadn't use her legs or hands, she hadn't used her eyes in a long while, feeling the dryness from the unblinking realm that she had been trapped in.

The soles of her feet were pressing against the floor, skin stinging under the pressure of her own body. She felt the air. She could smell the slight slate in it from an attempt to leave the room untouched for her return.

She was back and her legs physically couldn't hold her weight anymore and she collapsed onto the floor, her knees smashing into the wood causing her to cry out in pain, her throat cracking from lack of use. Her arms had enough strength left to stop her head cracking against the floor but not by much. She must have been gone for a longer while than she had previously anticipated. Maybe weeks or months. Or even worse, years.

She felt her body tense at the thought, the juxtaposition of joy and fear confusing her body into strange anxiety.

Her ears were coming back into use, the constant low hum defusing into a multitude of sounds including the urgent shuffling of feet coming towards the door. 

"Anna?" a voice- her mother's voice called out for her. She tried to call back but her throat was dry and cracking, no breathe in her lungs to speak. She heard the door open and felt the hands and arms of her parents cradle her desperately as her consciousness began to fade, the tears running down her cheeks and the tears the dripped from her mother's eyes onto the skin of her arms and she took her first breathe back in her own home.

The first real breath that she'd taken in a long time.

She was back. She was home.