He wakes up slowly. His brain, his entire being: a soup of drugs and dreams and other, murkier ingredients that refuse to identify themselves. He was just at home. He can still hear his record playing. He was just on a pier. He can still feel the push at his back and the terrifying lack of anything under him before-
A nurse enters the room. A nurse, because this is a hospital, a fact which is suddenly, strangely obvious. As if there were no other place he could be, at this moment. And that knowledge brings a clarity to the moment, an odd kind of normalcy that provides him with the words he needs to say, in this situation, with this person. Though when a doctor appears and asks him questions, he wonders, from their expressions, if the words are not quite right. But whether it's the name he gives, or the year he says it is, he isn't sure.
He doesn't have an emergency contact. That surprises him a little, but recent events are still murky at best, and he thinks there might be a reason for it. He thinks of Shayla, and gives them her number. She appears, almost like a magic trick, far sooner than seems possible. And she is honestly, openly concerned, without a trace of judgment, as though it is impossible he might have done this to himself.
"What happened?"
He doesn't know immediately. Several versions of events occur, most of them equally real, as far as he can tell. But he tells her the same lie he told the doctor.
"I got jumped by a bunch of kids, down by the beach."
"Oh my god."
He wants to ask her questions. Talk to her more than he ever has before. It's like something has been unlocked inside him, something that is reaching out. That's when he feels the first rumble of something desperate turning over in his head. But he ignores it.
Shayla wants to talk about him. He wants to talk about her. And because he's the patient, the one lying bruised and bloody in a hospital bed, he gets the pity, and he gets to choose. He wants to know everything. Her childhood, her fucked up parents, her unfinished high school education and the years she spent in an even worse off place than drug dealer in a shitty apartment in New York. And she talks about her art. Her quilts, her photographs, her dreams she doesn't really want to talk about because exposing them might make them breakable. He gets that part. He knows that fear.
The nurses come in and out. Apparently they think he jumped on his own. He still isn't sure if that's true, but he denies it. He also denies the drug test. Something about his records makes them suspicious, maybe, because they want a psychiatrist to look at him. He remembers Krysta then. He asks for her.
The rumbling is returning, louder now. That desperate something has begun to wake, restless and churning in his head. He just wants to talk to Shayla. Maybe she can show him her paintings, when he gets out of here. There's a heaviness, a weight dragging at his mind that beckons sleep, but he doesn't want to rest. Not yet. There's a brightness in her words that runs counter to his tiredness.
But his vision is blurring. More than that—his consciousness is running down like watered down paint, muddying with the rumble that's too loud for him to even make out Shayla's voice. He can feel it slipping away, whatever this is he's feeling, whatever he is in this moment: it's falling.
He can't help but let his eyes slip closed. The desperate storm inside him is now wide awake, but he isn't. Shayla fades. He fades. He thinks he recognizes whose hand was at his back, then and now. Pushing him down. There's nothing under him before he falls onto the rocks again.