TBI at the ICU

Hot metal brushed her cheek and abruptly, the world stopped. In a pool of blood she falls asleep screaming, drifting away down a gentle river of needles and bones pushed by heartbeat.

When she awoke her head hurt in two different ways, a sharp pain on the edges and a dull aching from the core of what had once been her mind. She calls out, but there is no sound to her voice, only pain in the attempt to speak. The room is green, as it was meant to be, as it had been in her dreams. She does not wonder if she is awake now, does not know, does not consider it important.

Calmly she waits for the next wave of fear, sure to come as it is sure to fade, quickly, without cause or meaning. Screaming. Panic. Voices. Shadows. Deep breathes and sleep. When she is calm the auras come talk to her without words, each glowing dark black, speaking in yellow sparks that sink into her skin.

The sparks feed her like the spiders on the ceiling wrapped up in billowing green yarn. The sadness she does not understand. It does not come into her skin, but she learns there is a lot of sadness here.

There is a clock on the wall. It is strangely the same. They must have brought it in, through the threshold with her when she fell. It ticks, comforting but painfully slow. It could fool someone, she thinks, how much this clock is like the old ones.

Fingernails work hard grinding skin or tap tapping as instructed by their new master. Wrists bound like wild animals, her hands are furious. They brought the scar on her hand with her too. She cannot see it but can feel it there, right where it used to be. She wonders if it is still from a submerged rock at a waterfall lands away, or if it, like everything else, has a completely different meaning now.

She can never go back to that waterfall, or any place else she has ever set foot. She understands this without thinking about it. There is only entrance into this world, only exit from the one she left. She knows this already although she cannot sit up, cannot leave the room.

When she does leave, ready to explore the rest of the new world, she is not prepared for what she sees. First she looks into a mirror and does not see herself. Her eyes look different. There is two of everything, two of her new swollen purple face, fuzzy, with fuzzy black lines marking where metal has replaced bone. There are two mirrors even. Things here look very much like things in the world she fell out of, but nothing is the same.

Unlike the other world, where everything exists already, everything in this world is constructed, built up painstakingly from where there once was nothing. There is intricate detail in the tiniest things. The rocks and the leaves especially, because the rocks are what everyone must stand on and the leaves are what everyone must breathe. It is so beautifully obvious here, spelled out in details that do not exist in the place from which she came.

It’s pretty here, the blurry green and blue doubles. Beautiful, but full of anger and pain. Anger at pain. Pain in every part of her body and pain in the simplicity of this world. Something is missing, but she’s not sure what it is. Just a hollow feeling, something left back in the other place. Later the sadness, and the hollow will fill with tears. But for now she goes to sleep. She will learn to live here, because there is no going back. She is home now.