You wake up to blinding lights. It feels as if your eyes were never closed in the first place. It hurts.
Your bed doesn’t feel comfortable anymore. You whine. Your quilt has become heavy, numbing. You try to get up and reposition yourself some way comfortable. You can’t. Despite what your brain is signaling, your eyes won’t shut either. The light is awful, all-encompassing; the room, the blankets, the mattress, the pillows have all evolved beyond numbness: into searing pain. You feel it all over, from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. Why can’t you move, you’re in agony, what’s happening to you? You try to scream, but your mouth won’t open – or is it already open? You can’t tell, but you can’t scream. You can’t let loose the agonies you feel, that remain rattling inside you. Nobody can hear the anguish you endure; nobody will come to save you from this horrible awakening. This anguish is something very few have experienced and fewer still have lived. You are afraid. Afraid of what you know will come, an ending. Why?
When a nervous system is exposed to anything outside the body in which it inhabits, the feelings experienced is unlike anything anyone can ever feel, unbearable. If you were to somehow survive the ordeal of having your nervous system extracted and placed into the world, you would be longing for it to end within the hour. Now you understand why you want to make that choice of your own volition – or wishing you could, in any case.
Miraculously your eyes, your globular little sensory nodes, have adjusted to the blinding light, yet they cannot move. They are locked, staring into the mirror directly in view of your bed, and there you lay, inside what you can only assume is yourself. Unblinking, you stare, your eyes begging for any kind of liquid, into that mirror and as they dry out, they burn. They etch this final sight into themselves burning. The last thing you see with your remaining vision; an image of a tangle of nerves spooled on the bed, knotted around themselves, under and around the bedding. On top sits a pair of loose eyeballs sunk into the 1.4 kilograms of putty-like muscle.
Slowly, you wither away. You are granted nothing but your sense of sight and thoughts, you won’t get the chance to say your final words, you won’t get the chance to draw your final breath, you will simply continue to experience the agonies of oxygen and carbon and nitrogen atoms repeatedly smashing into your nerves. You feel a million crashes into every part of you, you will feel gravity pulling you into your bed sheets, and your quilt being pulled onto you, increasing the area of which your nerves touch something, your brain screaming at you, at itself, to move – to escape from the pain. Your only mercy comes when the brain can no longer compute the signals being shot at it, your neurons stop firing, stop issuing commands to where your lack of muscles would be. At which point you are acutely aware that your time is coming to an end. What can only be described as ecstasy, nirvana, reaching a higher plane of being – from feeling everything, more than one should ever feel, to feeling nothing, experiencing nothing. You long for it to end and yet you’re fearful of it. Why? All of your problems will be solved, there will be no pain, no worries, no conscious decisions to make. Why are you afraid of the solution?
You awake in the same room, you are still blinded as if you never shut your eyes. You still feel numb from the morning. Yet, you get up. You move. You live.
Ethan Clark
Ethan Clark, coming from a village in Wales, has come to YSJ to study Creative Writing (originally dual honours with English Literature). The inspiration for this piece comes from a combination of conversations in seminars and sleep deprivation while browsing the internet at 4am, taking a mention of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and a comic panel of a nervous system as an office worker, and creating something new in the 2nd person.
Image from Credit:kentarcajuan on Unsplash.