I don’t feel anymore. Not really. It’s more an echo of what feeling was like, an echo of what traveling in a flesh and pulsing nutrient water casing was like. I exist in sensory deprivation, not having senses.
I do still have consciousness and empathy, which actually feels pretty serene now that I no longer have hormones or a brain to fuck up my experience of either of them. My body, the brain and endocrine in particular, were like two hideous menacing bullies permanently clawed in my back, pulling me every which way, tearing me from my insides, constantly, for entirety.
You’re still there, and I can see what your poor brain is doing to you. How you are so beautifully agonizing over how dreadful it must have been for me, consumed in your own terrible awareness of loss. My dearest imperfect tortured captured soul, projecting your images. How I wish I could tell you what it was really like for me.
First, a rustle in the bushes. I wake from a dream in which I am walking over stones cast in iron under a purple sky with green clouds and seven moons. I realize it is something large and fast creating the noise. The familiar state of paralyzing fearful power takes hold as my skin flushes in electric tingles.
My body is still churning in slumber chemicals, lethargic and flopping as my mind recognizes the sound of my screen door being thrown open. An instant flash of fear sparks adrenaline which surges me into more discombobulation.
For an instant my mind is the dull one, comparatively, as I mindlessly spring out of bed like an animated corpse, half dreaming, and press myself against my wall, crouching, feeling a pleasant cocktail of flooding sensations and emotions.
As a large figure in big boots and cotton for a shirt steps onto my floor mattress, a loud sound I momentarily don’t understand explodes through my consciousness. As I begin the thought of the idea of the question of whether or not I actually heard it, or was perhaps waking myself up from a dream or imagining it, a flush of heat from my side expands in all directions. More chemicals.
I begin to formulate the words I will use against the back of the man who is well on his way to running down my hallway, which are something along the lines of “SHhheholy you ffffhh.. did you just fucking shoo–”
Then, a calm in my inner storms, like the sudden and absolute silence of flipping a toggle. I look down.
The shitbag psycho had, indeed, shot me. The color is beguiling, black and deep and thick and gushing and pooling away from me like a radial colony of fire ants at 6200fps. It reminds me of the Big Bang of which I have never actually seen. I marvel at how gorgeous it is. I probably even smirk. It is all I am aware of, untroubled and harmonious.
Before I can test to see if it hurts to chuckle, calm gives way to the halcyon I’d sought to claw toward every moment of my existence. I have been here, and the body of your lover has been where you now find it, ever since.
I wish I could tell you what it was really like for me.
I was falling asleep late in the night with my glass door open, realizing the screen door was not locked. This realization gave way to the image of someone rushing through the brush outside my room into my house, and a tumble of images and feelings after that. I then sat up and wrote this story in bed, squinting without my glasses.