Dead to the World

Posted on Sun 24th Jan, 2021 @ 9:54am by Yuliette Marayan Dr.

783 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Denouement
Location: Brown Sector: Zodiac. The Gemini Hotel

In death there is no more running, nothing remaining to be hidden, no fear to process or worries to count. No one comes calling, neither friend nor foe. No more accounts to be kept or favors owed, no days to track. The slate is clean, there is no slate. No stabs of joy, no drive in the belly. No belly.

But the cousin to death lies in the unconscious, which is frozen in induced paralysis. Deep and dreamless. Though the autonomous functions persist, to the experiences, all else is temporarily restrained and, for the purposes of memory, indistinguishable from cousin death.

Yet this distinction does remain: from the unconscious there is a return.

First the sense of rising breath, of the having of limbs, though heavy and immobilized. Sunken. Then the testing flutter of eyelids, searching the near complete dark, though it feels daub-gray by comparison to the absolute nothing of the unconscious where black is not so much color as utterness. But the eye is ever light seeking, photonically hungry. When there is no light, it imagines spots and tracks phantom photons. It rolls around behind the lids as they close over them again and seeks to find something to process through their skin coverings.

The throat groans involuntarily; it swallows the fog of sleep to try to consume the last of it and free up the arms to rotate the body onto its side, curling reflexively, in memory of the womb. It can’t be dead, and it can’t be unconscious, so the body prefers to be ignorant. Or innocent. It doesn't rightly care what you want to call it.

Freeing the limbs, it grasps at the pillow and pulls it close to the heart. Because the heart is forever a lonely monster and a possessive miser. The face buries itself, not ready to return from it’s near death repose and reveal itself to the cares awaiting it. It remains yet in denial, as consciousness is wont to be, of all that comes calling, those god-forsaken demands the living must be answerable to.

Yet it only bobs on the surface between Unconscious and Not. It remembers despite its every effort to not. But its memory is imperfect. It recalls in part— inaccuracies, emotions, fleeting impressions, inventions, lies and half truths— and it makes a mockery of these mockeries in inconclusive plays as it casts characters and scenery in ill lit and badly timed snatches that should never have gotten past the writer’s room. The closed eyes squint against them.

They are so perplexing and forgettable that the body and the mind decide to leave the show early. If there is an early, as there is no curtain call on the horizon of the semi-conscious. Actually the semi-conscious is perfectly content to repeat the drivel ad infinitum, answerable to no director or critic and having been given the suspension of time, it wanders through its unfiltered farces until the body jerks awake against its own will, simply in order to escape the lukewarm gagging feeling of processing it’s own mental spit through which it can not manage to cross back into the comfort of seeming-death.

And so the day begins. The rubbing of the eyes. The stretching and popping of the bones, refreshed. The involuntary draw of a yawn, held out for the sake of lungs, desperate for the oxygen to feed the firing neurons.

There is, in this particular place, the vaguest slit of light through which the most pale outlines of the unfamiliar are marked out for the questing of the eyes to latch onto. The mind, this particular mind, addled yet by it’s own irreconcilable nonsense, seizes presently on the concrete as if it has leapt from the ferry of the river Styx and come upon firm ground.

This particular little shaft of light reveals a bed, many times over too big for the small frame of this particular awakening sleeper. The bed swallows her even as she pulls herself upright. The plush comforter and pillows retain her body’s warmth which she’s banked effortlessly while plumbing the depths of unconsciousness, and she’s loathe to allow it to escape now. Instead she blinks away the sleep and considers.

How long has it been since she slept so soundly? How long since she checked into this room, steamed the grime from every pore, and collapsed here? How long until the nightmare of living begins afresh? Is there any forestalling the inevitable by trying?

Maybe, she irrationalizes, if she never moves, it will all remain at bay.

Her bladder, her weakest link, submits to her a new request.

Obliging, her feet find the floor.

 

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