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39 - Dream

 dont hate me too much xoxo

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39 - Dream

 Luke Waters

Visiting hours at Coventry Hospital were from three to nine in the evening.

  At nine Mom woke Cassidy up and kissed me on the forehead. They put on their coats and left, promising to be back the next day sharp at three. They were staying at the Marriott, which was close by. When I was left alone, Dr. Forsyth came back in with two interns and a nurse. They checked my meds; the nurse changed the dressing on the wounds I had sustained, which stung quite a bit. I was utterly immobile – the task of walking to the bathroom and back in itself was an ordeal. I was feeling a deep tiredness in my bones; I was also pretty jacked up on painkillers so nothing was really making sense to me. At ten I was left alone again. All the lights in the room were put off, except a small incandescent lamp by my bed. My heart monitor beeped periodically. I stared at my feet, sticking out from under the covers. The blinds were drawn on the window opposite me but I could see the city lights twinkling, I could hear the faint sounds of traffic. From outside my room the doctors and nurses were murmuring, the occasional phone rang to disturb the relative peace.

 I found myself wondering what the crash had been like; who had gone to see me off at the airport when I left India; whether I meant a lot to those people. Would I see their faces in my pictures?

 You need to sleep, I told myself. There was no doubt that I needed to. I closed my eyes. My brain was just being stupidly overactive.

  *

 “Hello.”

 My eyes jerked up. The girl shut the door behind her, walking into the room as if she’d done it a hundred times before. I watched her.

 “Um...hi.”

 She was tall, but just moderately so, and she was thin. She had coffee-toned skin and thick, dark curly hair that was splayed all about her face; it was a small face, with large brown eyes a small nose and a small, pouting mouth. There was a little lip gloss smudged in one corner of her mouth. She was wearing a red Mr. Mojo Risin t-shirt and ripped jeans – from in between the slats of denim I saw smooth, dark skin. Around her wrists were silver bracelets, clinking as she walked. A nose piercing glinted in the dim light when her head moved.

 She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

 She sat down on the chair next to my bed. I kept watching her, almost sure I couldn’t look away if I wanted to.

 “How are you feeling?”

 I felt like the lilt in her voice could carry me away. She didn’t talk like anyone I had heard before.

 “Better,” I told her, giving her the standard response.

 Even she did not remove her gaze from me. Her face was...absorbing, something I felt like I could stare at for hours. I was drinking her in like a blind man who had never seen the sun before – but she seemed achingly familiar. And yet I had never seen her before.

 “Who are you?” I asked her.

 She shrugged her thin shoulders. “No one.”

 She crossed her legs, fiddling with a plain silver ring around her index finger. She kept looking at me and I stared right back at her, tracing the shape of her with my eyes.