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You open your eyes groggily to the sight of a nurse taking your temperature. They wake you, poke you and then give you the painkillers you need.  Time is dragging, digging its heels in until the pain that’s rousing from inside you.

 She leaves for a second as a buzzer goes off, out of the range of your field of vision before you realise where she’s going.  You daren’t turn to follow her, your head feels as if it’s been wreathed in flame and fire, a massive band of heat that encompasses your forehead, flaring to a brittle, tender spot that feels like  it’s been spot welded to the right side of your bandaged temple.  That weld seems to have attached a grotesque lump to the side of your head.  You’ll touch it gingerly every so often, absently until the flare of pain trips through your skull, rebounding around your head.  Lightning strikes flare through you, behind your eyes, arching to reach into your memory.

Which is blissfully, numbly, empty.  Blank.  The nothingness is all encompassing, yet, you recognise everything around you, without question.  You know you’re in a hospital bed, that you’re looking at a ceiling.  That the sky is blue, and you like coffee, not tea. 

You can’t ‘find’ your childhood – there’s nothing there.  Your age.
Your name.

The ravaging echoes of pain slides into your sinuses this time, making you wince, and close your eyes.  Your head rolls to one side, away from the wound, the injury that you’ve mapped through sharp stabs of testing the edges. Your fingers are clumsy, and slip down your face after a while, the gauzed tips scratching past your cheek.  You feel brief dampness on the tips and look at the blooms of blood, speckling out on the summits of your fingers.

There’s a woman, in the bed next to you.  Tears are rolling down her hollowed, pale cheeks, though her eyes are closed.  You watch them slip, sliding down, onto her jaw line, making damp patches on the sheets tucked around her, and under her chin. 
“I just phoned to say goodbye”, the woman said, off to one side of you.  There’s a duality in your head to the distance – the impartial, logical part of your mind, the one that’s still poking through the blank pages where your memory should be and finding nothing but inky smears and odd, sad images that are blurred through layers of gauze, bandaged from sight - seems to believe that its right next to you, but the pins and needles in your nose and  the bit of your brain that believes your head is the size of an air balloon – that part believes the voice is on the other side of a huge chasm.   There’s a pain coming back now – the shot you’ve been given is wearing off.

…I know, but the doctor told me that I haven’t got long.  That’s why I’m in this ward now,” the voice is continuing.  She doesn’t sound dreamy, in fact, she sounds cold. 
“Yes, I’ve got a companion now,” she continues, and you hear a rustle, as she looks over at you.  “I don’t know” the one sided conversation continues, “she’s never woken up,”
You make a soft, croaking noise, but that’s all you manage.   It slips from your lips, a kitten’s whimper, before you close your mouth again.  You can see a cup nearby, and you reach over for it, fingers sliding on the edges of it, before you gain a grip.  You hand seems rusty, stiff, like you’ve been asleep for dozens of years.  Scores of pain begin to chirrup in your head, your ribs, your hand, singing malign songs of oddity and ravage that makes you bite your lip.  The stab momentarily distracts you, as you begin to taste salt.  You’ve cut your lip slightly.  The chirping has become a chorus, and it rolls through you and over you, growing.  Time makes no sense any more – the black pain is discordant, out of sync, and follow you as you slip in and out of consciousness.
You no longer care who you are – only that you want it to go away.  

There’s a commotion in the bed next to you and you turn your head, a bolt of pain slipping between your shoulder blades and up your neck, into your head.  The crown of fire flares again, fuelled.
The woman’s heart monitors are making an odd keening sound, the quiet banshee whimpering as she slips away.  Curtains are whipped around the bed and there’s a lot of urgent whispering, and squeals, as the metronome turns into controlled chaos.  You tilt your head back to its starting position, resetting to the pain free position. The pain dulls down, the roar slipping and sliding in volume until it dulls back to being able to concentrate.  The doctors and nurses work efficiently – hopeful, for three minutes – four, and then regret begins to tip into the air, tilted in as the machine is silenced.  The feel of the room changes, she’s lost. 

There’s a rough spot, in your head.  Your memories are still gauzy, hazy.  Painful.
You reach, but can’t find your name.  The pain is slipping away now, taking clarity with it.   The cacophony trails off to the furthest reaches of your body, and crouches there, waiting to come out singing at the top of its lungs.   One day, it’ll pull you there too – as you wither, but by bit.

You have no memory of coming here, to this place.  You guess it’s a hospital – there are nurses bustling about with trays and clipboards, their white, starchy uniforms fluttering around them like flags, bleached leaves that hissed and murmur as they walked.  The squeaks of their plimsolls and trainers on the floor pendulums through you, regular beats as the rest of the world moves on. One joins you at the side of your bed, checks your temperature, your pulse, and then says “Are you in any pain?”  She’s flicking through your chart, reading notes and clicking her pen absently.  Her badge says ‘Jeanie’.  She had been with you when you woke up, taking your temperature again with an absent smile.
“Yes” you manage, swallowing past the dry patch in your throat.  She looks at your chart, then returns a few minutes later with a two syringes. 

“Cyclasine first” she says.
She puts it in slowly at first, till her hand slips, and the burning, stabbing pain slides up your arm in barbs.   Burning heat, pushing your veins, whilst it spreads up your arm.   It tangles at one point in your elbow, and the chorus roars into life, singing bloody operas and revenge as it flows through you.   At your shoulder, it blossoms, and then subsides as she realises what happened.
“Sorry” she says, with a sheepish grin.  She pauses and rubs your arm, massaging your vein.  A coppery, slick taste kicks up on your tongue.  The odd, sick feeling in your stomach goes away, withering along with the burning pain in your arm. The first one slips into you, and you feel odd, like your head has detached and everything is moving in slow motion.  Shapes and suggestions flash in your eyes, on flat surfaces.  The ceiling gains a texture that dances and moves, ebbing and flowing in eerie tides.  These tides form into strings, trailed by an invisible kitten or three over the roof.  You’re on the roof, tied there, watching the floor as the perspective shifts dizzily.
Time slows, moving forward at a sluggishly.  There’s serenity in the air, and you stop questioning what you’ve lost.  You don’t care what it was.  A grin spreads across your face, unbidden.  There’s nothing funny, you just feel like smirking. The smirk tips and slips around your face, sloppily moving from a grin, to a smile.

She flushes that through with saline, moving automatically, efficiently.  It burns again, briefly, and then she inserts the second needle, twisting it to make sure it’s seated well, before feeding that smoothly into your cannula.  Watching you carefully, she slowly empties the syringe into your arm to the 5ml mark, and then pauses and asks how you feel.  Your head is still throbbing a bit, and you think you say so because she empties the syringe at the same speed. 
The nurse smiles at you, “its morphine.  It’ll take away….well, just about everything to be honest”
Soon, this second syringe numbs you, heating the pain, and cooks it all away, in a delicious bath of taffy.  You feel the bubbling, warm slip up your arm, across and down into your chest.  It speed lines to your head, exploding in an encompassing blanket, and suddenly, the weld in your head is gone…like you’re sliding into a bath, cascading up like delicious honey.  It hits your neck, making your heart speed, and your leg muscles heat and tighten…and then you’re blissfully AWAY from the pain.  It’s still there, but you don’t care, all pain is gone.  Your memories don’t matter.  Your name is somewhere.  You can ask tomorrow, the nurses will know.  You close your eyes again.

You’ll say goodbye tomorrow.