A Letter

Ariana,

         Sam brought me her mother’s laptop so I could write you a letter. Writing it by hand was a thorough letdown; a damaged wrist and a broken arm don’t make for very legible writing. I would have dictated her what I needed to convey, but I expect this letter will be fairly long and I don’t want to make her take notes for three hours. Actually, I should probably apologize now for the lengthiness of this correspondence. It’s not really that I have that many things to say, just that I feel the need to make up for not responding to your letters all this time. Obviously it wasn’t intentional, and I know you’re very much aware of it. I just want to be able to talk to you, and this is as close as I can get until I’m at Sam’s. As far as I’m aware, it might take a little while still. That’s fine, we’ve been patient thus far. A few more days (weeks? Let’s hope not…) shouldn’t be too unbearable.
         I think there are some things I need to talk about, before I either forget or change my mind. I suppose it’s easier to make myself write it down here and then hope I don’t go back over it all later on and delete it… No, I really do want you to know these things. It’s nothing special really, nothing of importance, just some things I don’t feel ready to tell other people about. Not yet anyway.

         I’ll start off with Tony. Honestly, I’m not too sure what to say about him. They keep saying, Don’t worry he was arrested. They keep saying, You’re safe now, and, He won’t hurt you anymore. I can’t explain to them that I’m not afraid of him. Not after what he did to me the other night. The night that landed me here. I broke him the way he broke me. I hurt him more than napalm could have. I’m not saying he was right in doing what he did, but I understand. I understand because I would have done the same thing.
         I don’t feel very well when I think of that night. I said things I shouldn’t have said. I ripped away his mask and got down to the now unprotected core of his being. I exposed his insides, and I lashed out. I held all his secrets in my hands and exposed them one by one. I plastered truth on every word I spoke, and all he could do was listen, awestruck. He hated me right then. He hated me for knowing him. And I hated myself for the same reason. I knew what was coming, but it was necessary. He was liberated from the untruths which had been weighing him down, and I was about to be beaten into my last submission. Yes, it was terrible and it was excruciating… But it was worth it. It was worth the bloodshed and the confused tears and the muffled cries of pain. If I had to go through it again, I would. Just because I know that now… Now it’s going to be better. And I’m ready to be better. Finally, after seeing the boy I loved unleash the years during which he was destroyed unto me (because, yes, he was that same person I fell in love with three years ago) I feel ready to move on.
         About his arrest, I won’t be testifying against him. I don’t want him to be imprisoned, and I hope he gets the four year minimum sentence, if anything at all. I’m not being too forgiving; this isn’t about forgiveness. It’s about knowing what’s best for the both of us. I know that now, we’re both ready to get better. To talk and to get help. And I also know we’ll have to make our way through it all separately, because being together is detrimental to the both of us. I’m certain he knows that too. Still, I’ll keep seeing him. Not now, we both have a long way to go before that, but eventually I’ll see him again and I’ll talk to him. We’ll pretend the other night never happened, and then we’ll continue on our separate paths with only a slight hope of meeting again.
         That’s all I have to say about him for now, so I’ll just move on to something else.

         Sam asked me what it was like to be in a coma. I told her it was like seeing the inner workings of your mind. I feel the need to relive what I went through while I was there, and sort of assess what I experienced by telling you about it. You can skip this part, I don’t mind.
         Being in a coma was like being in a huge forest (the forest being your consciousness). The trees reaching upward into infinity and their roots scouring the earth. When I first awoke there, I was in a body. More than one body, actually, but none of them truly being real or unreal. That’s the thing with that place. Double sense. Nothing is what it is, but everything is what it seems. It makes sense if you don’t think too hard.
         When you’re there, thinking isn’t possible. Existence itself is a thought, as trivial as a fleeting inconsequential idea in real life. It’s all instant, momentary, and timeless. You’re stuck in the forgetfulness of your own conscience. It’s raw being. You’re trapped in your own deep, dark closet, with every exit available but none of them leading anywhere. You’re so free to do anything and go anywhere, that there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. It’s the ultimate paradox. All you can do is stand there, mesmerized, with infinity stretching out on either side of you.
         At first, you take the ground for granted. You just assume it’s right there beneath your feet. Then you come to realize it’s just as unstable as every other stretch of conscience. You have to focus on staying grounded, you have to look at yourself walk and feel your feet move and push the floor behind you. You have to be conscious of traction, otherwise there is none. At some point, you end up getting used to the infinite and you take that for given too. When you take the infinite for granted, it becomes finite. That’s when you reach the edges of your mind. The grey stuff. The forbidden.
         There aren’t any thoughts there, because everything is already a thought. It’s all concrete. As concrete as a wisp of vapor coming out of my mouth when I smoke narghile. That may seem contradictory, but it really isn’t. Like I said before, it’s easier if you don’t think about it.
         That’s the problem with people these days. They try getting down to the nitty-gritty, and end up forgetting what they started off with. They break up things into infinite amounts of tiny little pieces, and end up being unable to put them back together. Personally, I think I’d rather see the whole picture than a billion dispersed pixels.
         I keep getting sidetracked. I was talking about the bodies. I was in bodies. Four, if you count the physical one lying in a hospital bed. The second body was an exact replica of my physical one, as far as I could tell. It was me, just in better shape. I wasn’t too thin, and I didn’t have any injuries. Emotionally, I was pretty close to what I assume normal feels like. I was lying down in someone else’s body. I didn’t know whose at first. I just knew it wasn’t mine. This other body was immobile. It wasn’t dead but it wasn’t alive either. I consider that body to have been the comatose one in that realm, so I call it the ‘comatose body’. I’m realizing now how difficult it is to explain decently, but I’ll try my best.
         The comatose body was a connection to my physical body (the one in an actual coma). I found that out pretty quickly, and for a while I was able to open a different set of eyes and see things in the hospital room. I wasn’t able to move though, and I couldn’t say anything or react to the people around me. It was hard to hear things and see things, and to have people talking like I wasn’t there.
         At some point, I’m not sure what happened but I was ripped away from the physical realm. I was unable to access the portal I had initially been able to enter.Whenever I went into the comatose body, I wasn’t able to open the set of eyes which had previously let me see into the real world. I was constantly being thrown into different parts of the woods. As soon as I would approach the comatose body, I was immediately yanked away.
         Oh, that reminds me… I forgot to tell you about the last body, the fourth one. The fourth body was like water. A body of water. Not like a human body at all. You know how they say that sometimes? They say ‘a body of water’ to talk about a lake or an ocean. Well this wasn’t an ocean, and it wasn’t a lake. It wasn’t even water. It was where the ground became murky liquid, and the trees refused to root themselves. It was where the liquid was black, and clung to your clothes like an animal with infinite amounts of monstrous claws. It was where, in the middle, the comatose body lay. I was afraid of it, but not the same way ordinary water makes me cringe. It was a fear of being trapped before reaching the comatose body, my access to reality. It was a fear of being trapped inside the comatose body, and no longer having access to consciousness. It happened, on two separate occasions, that I encountered both these situations. At those moments I felt myself convulse into impossible positions, my bones grinding painfully together and my teeth clenched so tight I could feel my jaw stress under the pressure.
         Sometimes, I would give up on trying to make my physical body react. I would head into the woods and explore my own mind. Many times, it was beautiful. I would see and experience amazing things. I would see memories, good ones, which had been long forgotten. Other times, the woods would grow dark. The trees would grow old and crack, dried up and imposing. I would be afraid and become entangled in branches, scraped on thorns. I had to run from things hiding in the dark snickering at my misery. I know what those things were, taking shape in my mind. Addiction. Schizophrenia. Depression. Fear. Anger.
         At some point when everything was scary and I didn’t know where to turn, I happened to quickly glance behind me and saw something glimmer in the dark. It looked the way a single spoke on the wheel of a spider’s web half-heartedly shimmers in the sun just long enough for you to spot it. I swished my hand back and forth behind me where I had seen the glint of string, until I caught on to it. I couldn’t see it very well, light was scarce, but I ran my hand along the length of it and felt it go into my back. I pulled it outward, wondering how it could be attached to me, and felt it fixed somewhere behind my navel. I pulled on it again, hard, and found myself inside the comatose body. The discovery of the string rendered itself to be quite useful whenever I wandered too far into the woods. After reading your letters, I wonder now if the string was yours, Ariana, guiding my way back out of the labyrinth of my thoughts. I like to think it was.
         After a while I got used to the woods. I understood how to get to different places, and how to avoid the darkness as much as possible. I still had some frightening experiences, considering I was still connected to my physical body. For example, I was fully aware of them taking the tube out of my throat. Or even worse, when they operated on me. Imagine walking in the woods and being suddenly thrust to the ground, unable to move an inch. Feel a blade slicing through your skin, feel your insides expose themselves to people you can’t see. Hear the doctors speak amongst themselves. Scream in pain, knowing they can’t hear you. When you need more morphine, you can’t tell them. You can’t say anything at all.
         Sometimes, I heard people talk. It depended on how far I was from the comatose body. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was just echoes from the woods. Things I didn’t want to come in contact with, lingering bits of memories. I ignored them until I heard Sam. I heard her distinctly, through the trees. I thought she was in there with me, calling out my name. I tried to find her, and I heard her talking without understanding what she said. Finally I realized I was hearing things from outside. Once that came to light, I would pull on the string so I could be as close as possible to reality. That’s when I was able to hear your letters. Whenever I was in the woods, I paid attention to the voices I heard just in case I might hear her with news from you. You have no idea how much I longed to hear your letters. It made everything more bearable. And by the way, I love you too.
         Eventually I was sick of constantly being stuck in those woods. I was bored of being in my mind; I wanted the pleasure of physical things. Eating food, touching things, listening to music. I spent most of my time in the comatose body, trying to force my limbs to move. I was discouraged, so I tried a different approach. I tried to control my breathing. I would try to take deeper breaths. Once I felt I had control over my lungs, I progressed to my eyelids. It took a while, but I managed to open them just enough to see a sliver of reality. After that my efforts became relentless. Every millimeter of progress gave me an ounce of hope. I would sometimes leave the comatose body so as not to completely lose track of my conscience. The last time I did that was the first time I ever actually felt the urge to look at the comatose body, and try figuring out who it was.
         What I’m about to say deserves it’s own paragraph. I stood next to the comatose, and looked at its face. His face, I should say. His mouth was agape; his eyes as blue as mine are, his hair just as dark. I took one good look at the tattoo on his wrist and that’s when I realized it was my brother. I never told you I had a brother, did I? I never told anyone I had a brother. A real one, not anybody from my adoptive family. I don’t remember him very much, or at least I thought I didn’t. I have avoided thinking about him for years. Ages, really. He killed himself when he was seventeen and I was five. I’m not even sure how far I should get into that story, so I think I’ll simply leave it at that. I just thought you might want to know that, at some point, I had a brother.
         When I realized who the comatose was, I don’t know what happened to me but it was like that’s what I needed to figure out to finally free myself of the coma. It was as if all along, the only thing I had to find in that closet of a mind was my brother, whom I had long ago forgotten and tossed away into abyss. I went back into the comatose body, and I opened my eyes. My real eyes. I saw Sam, and I spoke. I wasn’t sure whether or not she was actually there. I asked her if I was awake. I was. Trivial things happened after that… nothing worth going over. The point is, I’m here now writing this to you. I’m okay. I’m feeling content, confident, and very much infatuated with you. I miss you a whole lot, I think I’ll just have to recover that much faster so I can talk to you again. I still have a lot of things I need to deal with, unresolved issues. Just remember that in no way will that ever translate to me not loving you and wanting a future with you, because that would be staggeringly false.

         This letter is already a few pages long, and I feel like haven’t even said all that much. I warned you it would be lengthy, and even after all this I assume we’ll have more things to discuss. This may seem ridiculous but I feel out of touch with the news, so I think I’ll have to make the nurse get me a newspaper or something so I can keep up with the current political scandals and mishaps.

         I love you, I’m sorry for the length, I miss you, and I hope you’re doing well.

         A broken armed hug and a drowsy morphine-filled kiss… Calvin