Always

fifty-two

L U N A
"I'm paralysed.
Where are my feelings?"

Darkness.

It was the only thing which seemed to enter my vision wherever I looked. And it wasn't the normal kind of dark of a starless night, or the darkness in your room once you switch off the lights. It was the kind where it seemed as if you had popped your head out into outer space. It was the kind where it felt like you were collapsing down into an endless pit, only without the feeling of the fall.

For what could have been second, minutes, hours or even weeks, all that surrounded me was that pitch blackness. Nothing seemed real. Not my surroundings. Not my thoughts. Not even the body I was in, which felt as if it was nothing more than a mere illusion. A fake.

It didn't give me the feeling of floating or falling. It gave me feeling of nothingness, as if everything I was seemed to be nothing more than a hazy bundle of nothingness. My mind was filled with the incoherent screams which replaced my thoughts and as much as I would love to grit my teeth to get rid of them, I couldn't bring myself to move any part of me. Everything seemed locked into place. Everything seemed frozen.

This was not how I had imagined death to be like. I had expected the nothingness and dark. However, I hadn't expected it to take this long.

A flash. That was all the warning I got. A flash of light before my vision which would have usually blinded me but the hazy replicant of my body didn't seem to mind the sharp ray of light coming out of nowhere. And then, without waiting for even a single minute, that small beam widened, and slowly turned into a huge wall of light. It was the exact opposite of the darkness I had gotten accustomed to, the darkness I had expected. It was everything the darkness wasn't; bright, white and incredibly uncomfortable to look at.

Without a single warning, everything changed completely. The white wall seemed to swallow me up entirely until every inch of the dark disappeared, replaced with the milky, blinding surroundings. Normally, I would have flinched under such a flash of light but again, my body refused to do so and all I did was stare at the light without being able to peel my eyes away from it.

And then I heard the noises. The light thudding of a heartbeat. The low noise of someone crying. Constant chants of 'stay with me' and a loud shout of 'call an ambulance.'

Instantly, a mixture of both relief and fear spread in my chest. There was a very high possibility that I had succeeded in what I had done to bring myself here in this blinding room. But there was also a chance that I hadn't, and Tanner had found me somehow. He had called an ambulance, an ambulance which was on it's way to help me.

It was selfish of me. All of this. Leaving without any word, without any explanation, it was selfish. It was so selfish how these actions were causing him so much pain. But at least, this was the final selfish thing I would ever do.

The voices slowly began to die down but the thrumming of the heartbeat lingered, the light drum of it pounding in my ears even as I blinked and everything around me began changing.

Everything shifted right as my eyelids fell close. My body felt like it was being compressed, tangled. A soft, warm blanket wrapped around me and apparently, it was supposed to bring me comfort but it did quite the opposite and I so badly wanted to shift and squirm but the gentle arms around me didn't allow me to do without collapsing out of them. What did bring me comfort was the feeling of those gentle arms around me and the light beating of the heart which could be heard in one of my ears which was pressed against a soft chest.