I quit throwing up by the hundredth but that was only because I gave up trying to eat.
Thirty-three minutes.
I don't know how to do anything besides make babies and works of art, and the former has less to do with ability than biology. I cannot be of help to anyone, not even the mothers of the screaming children. I cannot comfort them because the mark on my face is frightening and upsets them even more.
So I huddle in my seat in a solitary pool of misery and think that I must somehow deserve to be in hell.
I suppose, if you're busy doing other things, the jumps don't really bother you. It's when you just sit there and wait for them, cringing after the announcement (it's a law that they have to tell you to prepare... Geb told me that, once), waiting for space to stretch around you, then snap back like a rubber band. It's the snapback that's disorienting, but by then it's all over and you're light-years away from where you started. And puking into your lap.
The smell of vomit hangs in the air. The children are wailing, the adults, who are only just beginning to realize exactly how much they've lost, sob quietly. I hang on. I've always hung on but before it's been for someone else. My someone elses have ceased to exist, so what do I hang on for? To keep someone who has too much to do already from having to deal with a corpse, I suppose. That's good enough – my will to live must be stronger than I ever imagined.
What lies behind me is mundane beauty I cannot bear to think about – the room where I made my art. ("Studio" was too grand a term for it. It was just a bedroom, and one that rightly belonged to my children.) The sweetly dissonant voices of my girls singing a nursery song. The purple flowers that covered the hills outside my kitchen window for only three glorious days each spring. The feel of Geb's body against me, home again after a long trip. The love we made, the taste and feel and scent and sight and sound of things I'll never sense again.
What lies ahead of me is unknown: Death? Earth?
The next jump.
One hundred and seventeen.