Artistic License

Part II: Sketch

Each time I rose, more images assaulted my consciousness like bullets. Faces, my mother, father. A sister... her face was an unclear blur. Names, Jack, Kelsey, Rachel... my friends. A lifetime of recollections rejoined me after each loveless dream as I slowly regained myself.

However...

There were shards missing in the mirror I gazed into, a pond of silver reflecting my past and present. As I took in the image, I reached out to trace the cracks in my mind. Some faces were yet distorted, and the whole picture suffered in want of them. I felt broken, unintelligible, much like my reflection.

Arianna, my chestnut-haired roommate who wore a telling resemblance to my memory-self, was often there when I woke. She would kiss my forehead motherly and gift me with the time and date. Imposters clad in magenta went to and fro, bringing me drinks and food, but the cloudy-voiced woman did not reappear. I had wished she could stay with me, and I mourned her absence.

The only body I saw again was the man with the papers. He drifted in with the occasional blinking of the overhead light, questioning me daily with a barrage of inquiries into my shattered past. I knew once more where I lived, how many years I had spent alive, and that my grades in school were less than stellar.

After the third day of imprisonment (or was it the sixth? Should I count the hours awash in black?), Arianna and I began to have lengthy conversations, during which she revealed a gaunt livelihood behind her steep melancholy. She swore that she was my sister; her eyes brought me a deep nostalgia, but they did not feel like family. I brushed this aside, hardly trusting my own puzzle-piece memory. As we chatted, my words flew out with more and more ease, and she wove me stories of myself.

I was an artist. I could tell this, and Arianna confirmed it. My brain captured the colours and movement of every object, live or unmoving, that passed through my vision. When my head burned with a deep fire or my breathing tormented my chest, I closed my eyes and painted starlit skies on the back of my eyelids. In the stars, I found comfort whereas in the prison, only memories and anguish awaited.

One such morning of anguish was spent with the clipboard doctor, whom I came to know as Doctor Paxter. He trickled in on my sixth day of coherence to let me know that I was being discharged from the hospital. My cognition, he explained, his mouth sweet with condescension, was back to normal, and my injuries were not life-threatening.

My injuries... I had ponderously understood over the past days from hurtful experience and conversation that I had broken ribs and a broken right arm. I had been ever fearful to mention my inability to move the limb, convincing my stubborn self that it was because of the cast. The cast itself was a block of white, secreting away from the world a hideous piece of meat that was once human. I was fed the information that my humerus had fractured, a piece splintering, which then tore at my flesh like a little bony knife. Repairing the damage had not been easy, and I was projected to need many months of healing. My ribs would recover on their own in time, providing I didn't overdo it. Pfft! The most physically intense activity I do is walk to school.

I snorted a bit at the absurdity of this, but my derision failed to mask my worry. How will I get to school? Who will take me? Arianna? I did not feel exactly uncomfortable in her presence... it was closer to heartbreak. I wished to know this 'sister', but my attempts to remember her brought me only shards of the mirror that were painted black as onyx. I fit them into place, but they contributed nothing to the surface. Glaring back at me was a half-self, twisted and miserable. What was lost refused to return.

When today's magenta doppelganger glided in the room, she bore a stack of dog-eared papers. She passed them immediately to Arianna, but something in my conscious needed to see them. To read them. I suddenly put my left hand out for the packet, startling the nurse. Arianna held them for me to view without prelude, and I turned my attention to the joyful pink sheet lounging on the top of the formidable stack.