Nine years. A hollow echo of time, a number that feels more like a dream than a reality. It clings to the edge of my memory, half-formed, like smoke trailing from a fire long extinguished. Was it even real? Some days, it feels like a story I stole from another soul, a life that never truly belonged to me. But then, in the quiet moments, it slams back into focus—so vivid, so raw, it leaves me gasping. The kind of memory that cuts you down, not gently, but with the sharp edge of something you thought you’d left behind.

I remember the moment I came back to the world, a reluctant arrival. My eyelids felt heavy, stitched to the darkness, but they opened. And then those eyes—wide, gleaming with something like awe or terror, a mirror of the abyss I was crawling out of. The voice that followed—it rang out like a hymn of disbelief, “Oh my God! You woke up!! We thought we were going to lose you.” That voice, it wrapped itself around me like a lifeline, and I held on, though I was floating, tethered to a body that no longer felt like mine.

There was no room for words. My mouth was a desert, my lungs full of sand. I was drowning beneath an ocean of wires, tubes snaking in and out, tying me to the machines that hummed and beeped like mechanical gods controlling my breath, my pulse, my fate. I was less flesh and bone, more metal and code—something alive but not living.

Then the world fractured. White coats, green scrubs—human silhouettes blurred in a frenzy around me. Their voices crashed like waves against the sterile walls, their hands, their needles, moving too fast to comprehend. They were speaking in tongues, language lost to me, but I felt the urgency, the way their eyes flicked between screens, charts, IV lines. A needle slid into my skin like a snakebite, and then the burn—a fire that ripped through me, quick and cruel.

And just like that, the world dissolved. The voices evaporated, the lights dimmed. Fear melted into nothing. It was all gone—swallowed by the void, leaving behind a silence so deep it almost felt like peace.

But I remember. I remember it all.