Daymares 3

The darkness is like a long drink of smooth whiskey.  It bites at first and then provides me with a warm and comforting blanket.  I can almost feel the parts of me long forgotten.  I seem to even recall what it would be like to wriggle toes.  I would giggle if the sound would not be so obscene in the black silence.  The heat has waned and with it the pressure on my chest, the band around my head.  I imagine I could almost lift it enough to see around the room father than my limited range of sweeping my eyes back and forth.  Again, the urge to giggle,  as I recognize the almost nightly ritual of release.  It dawns on me that something more is brewing in my mind tonight.  There is a reason I feel so giddy and perhaps a bit stronger.

Today I captured a glimpse, a shred, a fragment and I held it long enough to see it.  I saw what was being shaved away from me.  In the palm of my own hand I held that sliver of blue with its faint white edge.  I have absolutely know idea what it means or what it could belong to.  It jogs not one memory in my mind.  But I know it came from me, and that just of itself seems like a miracle.  I risk a smile in the dark.  I cannot tell if it is more a grimace than a smile.  I do know that I cannot hold it long.  My face is not used to contorting itself into useless expressions.  I have lain here expressionless for far too long.  I have lain here unwilling to give up any more of myself than they are taking by releasing even the smallest of expressions.  It seemed only fair that I keep something to myself.  I wonder now how much I was giving away by not allowing myself to express who I am and damn the interlopers.  It is not as if they could take more than what they have by seeing my face move.  I would shrug at this but my shoulders are too heavy and in any event as the effort to move my lower arm and hand has proved, it would take too long to express the meaning anyway.

I imagine the taste of whiskey again and feel to my surprise a long slow shudder pass through me.  I am not quite sure that it reaches my toes (imaginary as I am sure they are by now) but I know that it flows through to my fingers.  I know this as I can see them tap a quick pulse and feel the rustle of the fragments they disturb.  I would have thought the spinning of the blades would have disbursed these little piles by now, but one must have become cradled somehow in the crook and curve of my hand's odd position.  I wonder what it would be like to have a handful of these gems.  I imagine leisurely sorting through them until I catch up with my own reality.  I cannot do this.  I might perhaps be able to manage one at a time.  I could perhaps view each tiny sliver, shaved and malformed like puzzle pieces not truly designed to make enough sense to ever come together by the same method I saw the piece today.  How many days would it take to put enough together to make sense of the one I saw?  And what were the odds that the pieces I would find woudl even belong together?

Suddenly the euphoria that had lifted me in my dark shell dropped me hard.   Crashing upon the rock hard surface of my own calamity.  I could be her for days, weeks, years even and never find a single fragment related to the next one.  How long had I already been here?  Long enough to turn into, well, into this pile of bones and flesh supported by the pipes and machines, living on the daily routine of the sun's gradual betrayal and the turning of the blades.

I would not let myself cry.  I wasn't sure I had enough fluid in me to do it anyway.  I did give myself the small luxury of curlin gmy hand into the fragments on the bed and tugging at the sheet.  It would appear I would be left with my sliver of blue and its edge of white.  I suppose that was not so bad.  There were surely others who had less than I.  I just could not remember who.