• The curtain that surrounds me, I can’t help but notice, is so ugly it is actually comforting. I lie in the bed, concentrating on the colored stripes; White, tan, yellow, orange, brown, white, tan, yellow, orange, brown. It’s almost funny; here I lie, my stomach doing flips, my breath raspy coming in and out of my dry throat, my head pounding and all I can think about is the color scheme surrounding my hospital bed.
    Everybody is rushing around, yelling at everybody else. My heart monitor is nothing but a dull ‘bleep-bleep-bleep…’ in the back of my mind, mashing in with the rest of the murmur and chaos outside. ‘Doctor I need-bleep-bleep…wash your hands-bleep-bleep-bleep…..bleep-help me with-bleep-bleep’. But it doesn’t bother me any. Inside, my thoughts are calm and smooth, a glassy lake surface. But the waters are also very dark, and no way could one see the muddy bottom of which every plant of my being grows. The murky waters drown me from the inside with calm thoughts of dark memories and even death.
    I was never afraid of death, even as my relatives eventually, and inevitably, succumbed to it as I grew older. I always just wondered, never worried. I frequently asked my mother about it; what’s it like to die, where do we go, what happens after? In response she would only come up with a feeble ‘young ladies are not suppose to be having such morbid thoughts.’ which only meant she didn’t know. Nobody did. I think that’s why I was so fixated on it though. But I was never curious enough to seek religious answers. No, don’t want to chance the memories of scary, frail and crumbly Grandpa - like a day old Salteen; all dressed up and yelling as much as an old man like him can yell at the front of the old church room. Mother persisted I go; ‘young ladies who do not are sinners’. She’d dress me in my silliest dress, and tie my blonde hair into a braid so tight I’d wail. Every Sunday I’d sit, reluctantly quiet, next to my mother as Grandpa screamed at everybody in the sweaty church.
    I haven’t been to church in twelve years.
    But in my thirst for knowledge I figured this; death is a mystery, and therefore wonderful. It remains one of the few things that man’s grubby fingers have not latched onto. Tonight I am going to become part of the grand mystery.
    White, tan, yellow, orange, brown, swirling all around me. My need to blink increases, but I do not; a sudden fear that if I blink, the world will collapse under the sudden, temporary, darkness engulfs me. White, tan, yellow, orange, brown, suddenly becomes yellow, brown, green, red, black. The stripes become less defined and they start bleeding into each other. I start to wonder what color they would become if they successfully became one, but my glassy thoughts become disrupted by the ripples of a sharp noise. I am stunned and confused for a while until I realize I can hear my heart beat within through my ears.
    Thump-thump-thump-thump. But wait; even though that’s the sound of a heart beat, I hear skirsh-skirsh-skirsh. The sound makes me think of lazy feet sliding against linoleum in an empty hall; Step-skirsh-then the echoes-skirsh-skirsh. I listen to the walking noise and watch the colors merge like an awful car crash of ugly colors until it all becomes one; Yellow-skirsh-brown-skirsh-skirsh-green-skirsh-red-skirsh-skirsh-black-skirsh-skirsh-skirsh. Then, very suddenly, I realize that all the colors would become black.
    Which my world finally becomes as well.
    No more smell of strong anti-biotic, no more white, tan, yellow, orange, brown, no more artificial wind by A/C. No scary grandpa, no not-so-straight-forward-mother, no nurse, no plastic--but strangely comfortable--hospital bed. I am now just floating. Floating in a warm sea of black nothingness. Me and the lazy foot steps. As I begin to let myself loosen grip on everything I’ve come to know in thirty years, I hear my name called from some far away land I’ve already forgotten. Again and again until it fades away back to the forgotten, distant land I continue to drift away from. I am alone once more, only the skirsh-skirsh of the lazy heart-beats here to remind me.
    And soon, that fades away as well.