888. Revenants, 2
(Selya)
They wanted to progress on more than just blood.
I continue feeling weirded out by how I relate to myself and my environment as I continue to change. I can’t seem to see the end. I often feel fuzzy or absent as my mind wanders around another dream or figment of memories hard to relate too. My brain is constantly parasite by these spores that always flow around and reach me like dust accumulating.
I noticed I’m eating less lately, although Amna reproached it to me more than once.
I can hear her confidence eroding regarding my situation without her needing to pronounce a single word. My gaze is always distant and yet I can read her thoughts directly at times. It still is unsteady and unreliable a sense, but I can feel it developing as if an eye was opening on the back of my head. And for other perceptions, it also feels like that as well.
Amna is becoming uncertain about me. She’s losing confidence about how I transform, as if she was growing worried for my health in a way. But she still has surprisingly high hope in Eschran’s unreliable words and what I seem to bring them. She still believes in the wish of Aïsshea if I had to say...
I’m still holding on my thin hopes as well, but I wouldn’t say I’m confident about my fate.
Sometimes, my heart stops beating, just like that.
And I stay aware. Sometimes it makes some parts of my body glow brighter in the dark. Parts of my body adjust themselves to that change as if it wasn’t that big a deal. Blood continues to flow under other impulses.
But then the heart restarts, waking up in a way. And pain returns in the numb parts and nerves that were affected.
And then, one day, I had another of these meltdown. The least extravert one. They’ve been less and less I think.
I could feel that I abruptly fell inside of myself, into a darker slumber, probably comatose honestly.
Maybe my body still could whisper at times, but I lost access to all my body senses for a far longer time than usual in slumber, and a far deeper way as well.
I could tell how the turquoise form of my flesh finally took over what little parts of me had been left.
The cocooning was reaching the end in every dimension.
And I felt that now I could get most of my energy from outside of my body, through that aura of tendrils I had been growing over time, rather than from my physical stomach. I guess food could still work, but I reached a point where my main supply of energy was this atomic gleam flowing through the void freely.
Maybe I was a plant now?
I realised that my perception of time was also shifting as I notice the rhythm of Amna checking on me accelerating.
I think I was losing track and changing to a different clock, at least for that comatose while.
But I also had the sad thought that maybe I wouldn’t see her ever again?
I think she watched over me as much as she could, perhaps caring for me as she would a doll, for goodness knows how long... It rapidly felt like months.
Maybe years...
~
I dreamt at a slowed down pace, losing grasp to reality. It wasn’t even a pleasant dream overall. Not too painful at least. But I realised I was reviewing memories and discarding some of them. I saw indirectly that I was forgetting things, losing pieces of myself like molt, skin flakes.
I saw these fragments of myself dissolving in the air around me. An aqueous air, translucent, uneven. My little world going through and beyond my previous body.
There wasn’t quite a defined line between me and the exterior any longer. Just different scatterings I could shift my focus through at will. I could keep a strong localised focus like a sight, but that was mostly a construct of my mind detached from my eyes.
Well, there was nothing and no one. And now that time itself felt like it was melting, I felt like I was dissolving slowly and it was as unpleasant as it was scary. There was no pleasure in there. Only a growing uncertainty.
I could tell I was slipping down in a way, but the line to my hope was slimy and unsteady.
I felt myself falling as I had feared in some ways, in a world of nothingness, with barely a hint of light above to remind me of what the normal world used to be.
In that dimmer and sparser abyss, I felt that I was giving up on everything I used to have and be. But the sensation of fear and loneliness continued nonetheless.
That sensation of sliding or slipping grew harsher as a sensation of real fall. And I could tell my body was discarding normal vital functions along the way since there wasn’t any point whatsoever now.
I couldn’t scream, but I felt myself falling into the inner void for a long and terrifying while.
Until it felt like floating rather than falling endlessly, but not less spooky nonetheless.
I could feel how after warmth, even electric charges were dissipating through my body.
I could feel how my temperature fell and my brain chemistry coagulated and settled.
By all means I was dead. All had ceased.
I didn’t see any newer light. Nor did I re-lived my past rapidly. Everything had simply molten into more abstract information of who and what I used to be. Like written fragments I still clung on as part of whatever I had become.
I guessed this time my dead body would liquefy rapidly as it rots, like any other cadaver. I had no strength to fight in that abyss in which I kept falling and floating without gravity.
I had fallen for good...
But it still wasn’t enough.
I reached an equilibrium in which I wasn’t discarding elements of my past any longer. I managed to save and balance most of myself hopefully. Reaching that status of inertia, nothing else seemed to impart me at all. As if the universe was gone, or reduced simply to me.
Did I reach the end of death itself? As a human, I probably did. But for me now, not yet?
I still felt that informal or shapeless sadness, realising something unacceptable fully.
Even without blood, without heart, brain, without anything of biology still attached to me that I could perceived, I still subsisted... I still was.
So long I chose to hold onto these countless elements constituting me I had grouped and arranged before, I might be able to remain.
But remaining here? Goodness...
I was tired of the nil long before I had reached that equilibrium.
Whatever I am and would become, I did not want to remain there for longer than necessary.
I was just sad, not happy.
I wanted to return.
Without feeling much sensations, I just rotated and changed reality of me and around me suddenly.
I had validated something like solving an equation. And the process now finally went the other way around. If I had felt like falling down before now I felt like I was falling up, or flying upward in an accelerating manner.
Toward the faint light of reality I had kept in sight and mind.
Toward my colourful sky of life...
Sadly I rose through the depths with some traumas returning first, but they gave back meaning to some of the emotions that had lingered all along.
And gradually, I floated my way back toward the world of light and countless particles. Their number around me kept growing exponentially as my awareness of myself rose up and grew again.
From the greatest collapse, I made my utter return toward matter, life and flesh. Returning more rapidly than I had imagined to a body I believe was mine.
~
I opened my eyes. It was sudden.
I rediscovered the sensations of headache, migraine and confusion of waking up hazy.
Real sensations coursing through my body lost their impression of being random and returned to making sense again. The world I could perceive with all my senses was reconstructed rapidly into something I could relate too, with senses of physics and identity.
I could tell I was back from a distance hard to describe. I felt like I slept for years.
In the distance I could hear water from the shores of a lake. Not much.
My sight of everything unnatural was dimmed as if I had closed the other eyes all around me. I shut my other perceptions for a while to focus on just the old kind of reality for a moment.
I breathed. I saw fissures and gaps in the ceiling, and holes on the dirty walls. Light and air came in there.
The noises... The pictures... The light. The air along my skin and entering my lungs.
I coughed dust. My muscles all twitched but my body reacted rather confidently.
I felt reborn in a way. But bringing the palm of my hand to my chest to feel the heart below, I couldn’t find any beat.
I couldn’t see nor feel it inside...
My hand moved as I wished it so, but I felt how the skin of my chest and my hand against each other were cold like cloth. What have I become...
I rose my hand in front of me to look at its colours and the organisation of tissues inside. Blood was still flowing gently inside, but chemistry of everything felt softer, more liquid.
I think I’m an undead monster...
I sighed and left the hand fall back onto the bed sheet.
However it didn’t reach a soft and clean layer of linen. It scattered dust and spores that flew around and dug its way through a layer of mosses and mushrooms.
What?
Turning my head slightly, I realised how much my bed had been swallowed by growing mould.
It’s not impossible but still pretty rare to get things like that to contaminate your beddings so rapidly. Things spread fast sometimes, under the right conditions...
I was still more troubled by the fact that I couldn’t find my own heartbeat and still feel alive by any other metric.
My breathing was normal as I focused on it. But touching my own skin, no matter where, it felt like touching someone that had passed away and already cold.
~
