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You wake up enveloped in a nameless, screaming sense of wrong. You can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep, or—have you been asleep at all? Are you even awake, now? Everything seems foggy and unclear, and reality is slippery, sliding rapidly out of your grasp.
Each time you wake, things seem to get a little clearer, sharpening. But: you try to remember who you are, why you’re here, where here is, and you can’t. You try to remember if you’ve ever felt this way before and come up empty.
You wait.
Time passes and things get clearer and then suddenly there are solid walls around you, covered in picture frames. They make your head buzz when you try to examine them, so you abandon the effort. The air in the room feels stale and heavy, part hospital-antiseptic and part stagnant-water. Empty and full all at once.
The curtains are drawn over the windows. You try to push them back but find that you can’t, so you settle for the sliver of light peeking out from between them, the clean line of white it casts across the carpet. A neat row of small potted plants sits on the windowsill, all in various stages of wilting, like some sort of macabre marching line. More death.
You try opening the door that leads out of the room, but it’s locked.
The next awakening feels different. It takes a moment for you to realize it’s because the strip of light on the carpet isn’t there; it’s dark outside. The room feels different at night. The pictures on the walls are illuminated only by the ghost of light from the streetlamps outside; the plants have wilted further; the door...is open now.
As if propelled by something outside of yourself, you leave the room and find yourself in a narrow hallway. It feels very long, although somehow you know it’s actually pretty short. More pictures line the walls, and to your surprise, you can look at them now without being struck by that odd staticky feeling. The pictures are full of faces you can’t quite make out, but you have the sense that if you looked closer at them you wouldn’t be able to tear yourself away, like they could keep you trapped inside the memories they hold: a vacation to the Grand Canyon; a wedding; a picture taken from the pristine lawn of a new house; a woman smiling from the hood of a car; a whole life that you could get lost in right now, it would be easy and sweet and warm, to drown yourself in whatever remains of this life, of your life—
But then you hear something that startles you out of this possibility. A crash, a shattering sound. You make your way down the hallway and emerge into the living room, where a woman kneels in front of what looks like broken glass, her head bowed so you can’t see her face. She’s shaking. A pool of liquid spreads steadily outward from the mess.
You kneel next to her. She can’t see you, but suddenly you want her to. You want to grab her by the shoulder, rouse her from her solitude—she gets like this, retreats into herself, and what will she do now without you to pull her out?—scream, destroy, anything that will render you visible to her. You fear what will happen if you try.
You start watching the woman. You begin to think of her as yours, as you follow her daily comings and goings—out of the house when the morning light is still weak and watery, back after dusk. Around the house, you find scattered hints about what has happened to you—medical bills, copies of a will, the detritus of your final months. You hate this. The watching. The helplessness. When she’s inside the house she just sits in the living room, doesn’t do much other than drink and sleep. The room where you first woke up remains locked and closed.
When she sleeps, you feel closer to her. You have so much you want to tell her. One night you make a mistake. She is asleep on the couch in the living room and you get too close—for a second you think you can even feel the warmth of her skin against yours, and you lean further into the sensation, until it envelops you—and the woman stirs, blinks her eyes open, says, “Dani?”
You freeze.
To her, of course, it isn’t real. She frowns at the empty room and closes her eyes again, leaving you alone. The experience leaves you frightened, and you make sure to keep your distance going forward, even though it hurts and hollows you out.
When, after some time passes, a kindly mustached man arrives at the house, you know instantly that whatever void keeps you anchored here can’t last forever. The man stays for a week, cooks elaborate meals, cleans up all the dust and empties that have accumulated in your absence. He opens the locked door, helps the woman sort through the room you once shared, tries to convince her to let him wash the sheets on your bed: “You can’t sleep on the couch forever,” he says gently, but she just shakes her head with characteristic obstinance, and you wish you were there to roll your eyes at her.
Jamie talks to him about you. They tell stories over a box of pizza and a bottle of wine, and you can remember when you both moved in here, your first night, eating pizza on the floor just like this. You turned the radio on and danced in the then-empty kitchen and laughed breathlessly about your new life together and you were here, you were hers, and it was no less real for the fact that it couldn’t last forever.
The familiar impulse presents itself again: to disappear into memory, to leave life to the living. This time, you follow it.
