Awake

I struggled through the dense, muddy clouds of unconsciousness. It was in my lungs, my nostrils, my throat. It pressed down on me, heavy and thick and claustrophobic against my skin.
I pushed with all my strength but the clouds did not clear. My limbs were too heavy to lift. Dead weights. My head was flooded by the sea of fog.
Eventually, I stopped willing the murkiness to clear, and sank back into it instead. Dirty, hot, and clammy.
It seemed to be groping at my arms and my torso, hugging them… But the grip was slackening. It’s fingers dragged across my skin, holding on until it began to fall away, bit by bit, limb by limb.
Relief flooded through my body like water rushing through a river bank that has been dry too long. Cool. Releasing. Lifting… And then sharp, scorching. Agonizing pain stabbing every inch of me.Like a flow of lava it filled my body with it’s torture.
My body seized up and I was suddenly aware of every nerve ending in my skin, every muscle, ligament, tendon in my body.Each one of them silently piercing my mind with their screams. Excruciating. 1

The murk, the relief, and then the pain… It lasted just a few short seconds, but to me it was hours.
A solid mass took the place of the lava, and as my senses began to start working again, my body became too heavy to move. Instead, I listened to the sounds around me.
A gentle and artificial humming was the first thing that reached my ears, but that noise was followed in fast succession by a multitude of sounds that jostled for the limelight; the frantic clicking of grasshoppers, rustlings of some unknown animal in the undergrowth, the gentle swaying of trees in the breeze. But closer than these, the domestic sounds of a small house; the creaking of wooden floorboards, and a faint flow of water that seemed to be all around me.
I knew at once that I shouldn’t have been able to hear these things. Yet they all presented themselves as clearly as if I was a blind bat.
At last a gentle rhythmic sound reached my seemingly new ears, even more subtle than the rest. It was not obvious to me what it was, and I lay there for a few seconds, fine tuning my ears to this particular noise and blocking out the rest. What was it?
Then, something clicked into place in my brain, and I suddenly realised what it was: the noise I was hearing was the workings of a human body.
First, the regular expanding and deflating tempo of the lungs,underneath the rhythmic pumping of the heart. The pulse of blood through an intricate network of veins, finally reaching the organs, all of which I could hear working to fulfil a human’s most basic needs.
It occurred to me then that it wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t unique. It was just a machine; a machine that could be ripped, torn, and feasted upon.