Slowly the darkness lifted. Well, my own darkness lifted. By which I mean, I came to. How long I had been unconscious, I could not say. Can one ever say? I mean, one does not check the clock just before losing consciousness, and then check it again once consciousness is recovered and so come to an accurate understanding. Oh, sure, one might slowly get a sense of time lost by, I don’t know, looking at the state of the day, the sinking or rising of the sun, the passage of the moon or some such, but what if one had been out for days? Or weeks? Whole months, even, comatose with not the slightest notion of time nor anything else, for that matter. So, on recovery, the eyes slowly flickering open, one might find it is winter when last thing it had been spring, but which winter and of which year?
