Wide Awake - Chapter One

Wide Awake - Chapter Two

Copyright 2013  Shelly Crane                    All rights reserved

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Useless Fact Number Two

You burn more calories sleeping than watching television.

          The television was on. It woke me with screams and I looked up to find some women yelling at each over a scrawny man. Jerry Springer was still going strong after six months apparently. Six months…

          I tried not to cry again.

          It had been over a week since I woke up. My body was alive, but my brain just shut down. It was as if I was still asleep, but aware of what was going on around me. My eyes were open, and I just lay there and tried not to remember that I couldn't remember anything. My parents told me I was nineteen years old. I'd had a birthday only a week after the accident. Nineteen years of my life were gone, as if they never happened.

          After they told me, I just turned on my side and refused to move. Refused to participate. Refused to be the person they told me I was. It made no sense. I could remember who Shakespeare was. I could remember what eight multiplied by eight was. I could remember what happened on September eleventh and the Twin Towers. So why couldn’t I remember what color hair I had, or who my friends were, or even my own name?

          The days blurred, the minutes pressed into hours.

          The doctor came in and yelled at me, told me I was being a child. The police still had yet to 'interrogate' me, he said, like getting run over was my fault. My parents defended me, said that I'd been through enough. They begged me to eat and when I didn't, they had someone come in and put cloudy liquids into my IV to sustain me. I knew I was reacting. Whether it was overreacting or not, I wasn't sure. But wasn't I due a little bit of that after everything I'd been through?

          But one factor was constant. Mason.

          He never scolded me, he never gave me pleading looks to eat, and he never looked on me with disappointment. He just looked. He came in every day, more than once, and he'd stand in the corner or by the door. He watched me in a protective manner that no one else possessed. But his eyes also held an understanding in them, like he knew that I needed to have this time to just…be nothing.

          Sometimes I stared back at him, sometimes I just closed my eyes. But today, as I looked over to find the woman — my mother — asleep in the chair with her head awkward and laid over the back of it, I knew it would be different.

          Today, I was going to start trying. I couldn't be a vegetable forever. And I felt bad. My mother looked wrecked. I knew they worried about me this week.

          I moved my arm slowly and shakily to the buttons that made my bed sit up. It hummed softly as it lifted me. I had no strength at all and it scared me a little to think about therapy and eating and…going to the bathroom.

          I groaned a little in distress at that. I was going to be solely dependent on someone for who knew how long to help me while I got myself back together. I felt so undignified and I hadn't even started yet.