wake up expecting everything to make sense.
That’s the cruelest part.
The hospital room is still too white, too clean, too quiet—but I tell myself that hospitals always feel strange when you first wake up. That the tightness in my chest is anxiety. That the ache in my head is from fainting. That whatever I saw last night was my brain filling in gaps with fear.
I cling to that explanation like it’s a lifeline.
But it doesn’t hold.
Because when I close my eyes, I don’t see shadows or flashes or half-formed nightmares.
I see gold.
Not light. Not metaphor.
Eyes.
My breath catches, sharp and painful, and I force my eyes open again. The monitor beside me beeps faster, tattling on my panic.
It wasn’t real, I tell myself.
It couldn’t have been.
People don’t change like that.
Bones don
