The flashing lights were blinding, and blaring sirens echoed inside of my head. The world continued to spin around me while I tried to overcome the sensory overload that threatened to make my head explode. I tried to cover my ears, attempted to block out the noise, but the sirens continued wailing. Then the screams began. They were almost as bad as the sirens, but I was able put a stop to them once I realized they were my own.
Just when I thought that I couldn’t take anymore, everything stopped. I was left in total darkness; I let out a sigh of relief. The only thing I could hear at first was the ringing in my ears, but soon I could make out a distant crying that came out of the nothingness.
“Hello!”I yelled, there was no response and the crying continued. My feet began to move, guiding me towards the cries.
It felt like I’d been walking for hours in the darkness without getting anywhere, until my foot hit something. My hands examined it trying to figure out what it was. When I brushed a cold metal knob, I knew I was standing in front of a door. I felt it’s frame. No walls connected to it, and there was nothing behind it. I walked around the door a few times, trying to understand its purpose but I couldn’t come up with anything.
Eventually I became too curious. My hand searched out the knob and twisted it. The door opened a crack, and to my shock a small stream of light poured out. I pushed it open the rest of the way and stepped into a wide hallway. Harsh lights buzzed above me and a sterile smell burned my nose. The crying became louder the farther I walked down the hall.
A wheelchair was left abandoned in the middle of the floor and a gurney was pushed up against the wall. I rested my hand on the wall, trying to make sense of what was happening. A light gust of air tousled my hair and pulled my attention back to where I’d come from. The door was gone; an endless hallway was all that remained.
“There’s no turning back now,” I whispered to myself. There was a door a little farther down the hall, where the cries seemed at their loudest. I put my ear against it and listened for a few moments, afraid to disturb whoever was inside. But again I became to curious to see who had guided me here—I think it’s safe to say that if I was a cat, I would be very close to my last life. Slowly, I pushed the door open.
There was a girl with messy brown curls sitting next to a narrow bed, crying with her face in her hands. Her clothes were wrinkled as if they’d been slept in, and empty coffee cups littered the floor at her feet. I listened to her tormented cries, they made my heart ache.
It took me a moment to realize the bed wasn’t empty. There was a boy asleep, dreaming far away; remote and peaceful. His head was sunk in the pillow, eyes blind behind their lids; he was given up to his dreams. Tubes and wires connected his body to machines that blinked and buzzed around him. A faint beeping came from the machine that monitored his heart. There was a steady pause between each of the beeps, as if each was a new battle that his weak heart struggled to win. I walked closer to him and brushed his light brown hair out of his face. The girl looked up for a moment then, and I was shocked to see a familiar face; my own face.
“What?” I was going crazy, this wasn’t possible. She couldn’t be me because I was me, right? We shared the same blue eyes, the same features and body; but she’s not me. I looked down at the boy and realized it was Justin. My world began to crash down around me as I struggled to grasp at the last tendrils of what I thought was reality. The air had changed in the small room, into something much more threatening.
I tried to leave—I’d lived through this once, I didn’t need to see it again—but Justin suddenly grabbed my wrist and wouldn’t let me go. He forced me to look at him, his icy blue eyes burned into me. His heart monitor became frantic, the beeping getting louder and faster until it peaked, and stopped altogether. A high pitch hum stretched out from the machine. I thought Justin would have let go of me, but his grip only tightened around my wrist; squeezing more and more until I let out a cry of pain.
