Current mood:	stuck
Entry tags:	nanowrimo

NaNoWriMo Words 1 - 1,093
Can you imagine a world without color? Can you imagine a place with no sound – not even an echo? Can you imagine what it would be like not to feel your feet touch the ground as you walk? Can you imagine how it would feel to be nothing at all – just a chasm of blankness where life used to be? That is what it is like to be dead.


When I woke up I saw white. It wasn’t a light; it wasn’t angelic in any way shape or form – just white. Contrary to popular belief, my first thought wasn’t that I was dead. I wasn’t even particularly confused at first. I just thought, ‘wow, that is an ugly shade of white.’ It certainly wasn’t pure as the idea of ‘white’ implies, and it wasn’t very clean either. No, there was some kind of thick smear on it, as if someone had run greasy hands over the surface repeatedly. And it was a textured surface! Bumps and groves covered the flat plane of it. This was the first thought I had, and it consumed me for what might have been ten or fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. It has occurred to me that I had no real gage of time at that point. I knew only what was in front of me, and that was ugly, putrid white.

I don’t actually know how long I tried to figure out what was wrong with that white surface. It’s almost funny how all consuming that first thought is. I knew nothing. I did not know who, what, when, where, or how. I didn’t even know that I was in a room, and that what I was staring at was a ceiling stained with my own blood. That realization came later, when I managed to scrape my flaccid body from the floor into some kind of sitting or standing position. My muscles no longer worked, at least, not the way muscles work in the living world. It was apparent that my muscle memory was wiped along with my actual memory, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s hard to be sure what exactly happened when I first woke up. It’s hard to remember anything at all.

I managed to look around the room with eyes that didn’t remember seeing. Sight is the first thing that comes back to you after you wake up. I imagine it’s because your eyes have to open before anything can happen. I’ve heard accounts of others that woke up seeing nothing at all. Maybe I was the same and that awful white had faded in from a more pure white, the kind that people really imagine seeing when they think they’re dying. Who knows? I don’t particularly remember. The walls were much of the same: an awful, disgusting white. The floor wasn’t much better: brown, rotted wood. Later on, when I remembered literary devices, I would come up with delightful similes and metaphors for my first realizations: the ceiling, like snow that a dog had pissed on, or the shit-stained, bug-gnawed floor. When I first woke up, the word that came to mind was ‘yuck.’

Are you bored of walls and floors yet? I know it starts out a lackluster tale, but I promise more in the future. It’s just that how else can I describe to you how overwhelming those first few discoveries were to me? This is important, damn it, trust me! You’ll find out later.

Ceiling, walls, floors. My sloth-like detective work revealed a few other things soon after. It was a bedroom – there was no doubt about that. I knew this because there was a bed, although it took me a while to figure out that it was a bed and not just a lump of orange, blue and purple stripes. Furniture – I remembered that next, the bed having nudged me in the right direction. I felt a nervous pull of energy as I remembered descriptive words: end table, dresser, mirror, closet! I labeled the whole room in a frenzy, as if I was unearthing a scientific breakthrough. Chair, lamp, rug, bookshelf! Blankets! Pillows! Shiny, shiny jewelry box! Light switch, light bulb overhead fan! Vent, radio, gun, body!

I know those last two don’t quite fit in with the bedroom scenario, but that’s how I discovered them, too. At first I didn’t understand. They were in the bedroom – this must be normal. I could think of names for them! I didn’t care that blood was pooling and seeping into that ugly wooden floor. I didn’t care that the gun was trapped in the rigger-clutched claw of a hand. I didn’t care that the body was in a funny, strange position with legs bent the wrong way and a gaping hole at the back of the skull. In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d paid attention to these details. I wish I could really remember the way the face looked as it stared up at the ceiling like I had only a short time ago. The eyes must have been glazed over, because the body never came to the same exhilarating realizations that I did.

I didn’t hear the door open, but someone came into the room. This face I do remember: hazel eyes, auburn hair kind of like a sunset. Her mouth fell open like a trap door as she observed the room in a completely different way. She did not feel joy or excitement like I did. I knew this from her eyes, those ocean-like, terrified eyes. From the moment I noticed her I saw only her eyes: blank pools that filled with terror the way an hourglass fills with sand. I could actually see each grain falling from iris to pupil as the focal length adjusted to the scene. The terror was beautiful and calming to me, as if for a moment I understood what it was to feel.

My memories of this first event are almost solely of the woman’s eyes. Whether they invaded the entirety of those moments, or if I simply had not learned sound yet is at loss to me. I know that others came into the room, but at this point, everything became a blur. I had no more room for impressions, and I had not yet learned how to remember. When a person dies, they forget everything they learned in life. Sure, there are crash courses to help recover those things, but they don’t help in the first few moments. At least, not for me. My pick up was late.