Concept in Actuality

It was terrifying.

One moment you are being of assistance and use and the next you realize there is something wrong. You flush and realize that to a pounding has started between your ears, signalling the beginnings of something neither right nor normal in the most obvious and terror initiating of realities.

'Are you alright?'

'Yeah, give me a sec.'

You leave, walk past the curtain and into the hall and your vision closes around a pinprick getting steadily smaller... faster and faster until you feel yourself stumbling about like a blind man reaching and grasping for any sort of familiar landmark - any wall, any object, any thing. You begin to panic as having no way to understand where you are, if anyone is around... truly, truly alone.

Your heart flutters harder and you feel the heat increasing drastically, in time with the tumultuous pounding that resounds in your head. You bump into something and want to just collapse but know that you must be stronger than that, to carry on until you somehow get to where you need to go - but which way is which, there is no direction, there is no time. There is no sense of being as you are totally alone.

If your vision goes, shouldn't your other senses sharpen? You ask yourself hours later but that was hardly the case. As your head spun, your darkened eyes flitted about, praying that they could somehow reach ... until by the total grace of God you find the third open doorway into the patient kitchen. The reality of this actually happening is significant... you walk, or stumble rather, down a broad hallway past two open doorways and into the one with that which you seek.

You fumble for the door and it opens to blow cool air at your legs to travel to your ankles. You grasp the first thing you can, walk to the wall beside the fridge and curl up. You chug the orange juice and hang your head between your knees.

Put your head down as far as you can, you remember her telling you. You sit like that for a while and slowly sip the rest of the juice. You reach for another one knowing that one small plastic carton is not going to help you here, a small army of glucose molecules were going to have to do their work to bring you back to present time, but what is time? You cannot even begin to process such - survival and instinct take over.

As that container is downed too, you begin to stand but ever so slowly. Your head is still spinning and while you have some select vision, you are seeing stars. You walk across the tiny galley kitchen and peer into the door of the microwave.

Pale as a sheet with horrendous, dark circles ringed under your eyes. You look like a representative of the dead with deep set eyes sending shiver-worthy and piercing gazes into your own reflection.

You grip the counter with whitened knuckles, holding not on for dear life but as a reminder that you stand in a true reality, something that is not false. You clutch that surface like you clutch the promise for any degree of normalcy to come back to your head.

You also notice the temperature as you are practically sweating but shivering all in one fluid movement of the finesse of the body. It's so intricate but is so deadly and misunderstood.

You walk back to the hallway with no conception of time. How long you spent there, you truly have no idea. It could have been hours, it could have been days, it could have been minutes.

You are scared to ask.