April 16, 2013

Blaine was constantly surrounded by people. People and noises. Sounds he could barely decipher, people whose faces he didn't recognize, people who gripped his hand and said how happy they were to see him.

He could smile. He could make the corners of his mouth lift up, force his lips to curve. He didn't know what it meant to smile, really, but it seemed to satisfy the gawkers who were always around his bed.

Everything around him was blurred, and nothing made sense. A pretty woman with dark hair told him that he woke up two days ago, but he strongly suspected that he had actually fallen asleep and was now experiencing a very vivid dream. What was the last thing he could remember? Didn't he hear once that in order to know whether or not you're dreaming, you have to try to remember how you got to where you are? Well, he certainly didn't remember how he got here. That should be a clear sign that he was dreaming.

If he was dreaming, no one was letting him wake up. There was never a moment that someone wasn't prodding him, shining light in his eyes, or saying his name, distracting him from trying to reach a state of real consciousness.

At night, when all the visitors but Cooper disappeared, Blaine let himself drift in and out of sleep. He hoped that going to sleep in a dream world might mean waking up in the real world, but he awoke without fail to the same strange blur of a world, and he remembered nothing of sleeping but blank spaces and silence.

The last thing Blaine remembered before this dream world was a comforting man in a flannel shirt and a ball cap saying his name. Blaine tried squeezing his eyes shut and concentrating on that memory, but he couldn't concentrate for long enough. No matter how hard he tried, Blaine would almost immediately fade back into the blurry world, the dream world, and become distracted again by people talking to him and about him and poking him with needles.

But at 11:00 on a Tuesday morning, Blaine remembered something.