4. Diego
4
DIEGO
T he darkness persisted. Time ceased to matter, insignificant to my dulled senses. It was no longer a quantifiable measurement I could track or follow.
No thoughts resided in this total abyss of nothing. Emptiness replaced all that I could know or feel, but deep down, in my soul, I was aware that I lived.
This wasn’t death.
I was still alive, somehow, but that was the extent of what I could determine as a reality in this fugue of nothingness. It spanned and stretched, consuming me as that abstract entity of time passed on. Captive and trapped, I shrank smaller and smaller, tinier and weaker under the oppressive weight of this void.
Blackness consumed me, never fading, but it ebbed and flowed, tricking me into a feeble anticipation that I would wake from this haze.
I didn’t.
It gripped me, crushing me into weightlessness. Floating in space. Suspended from reality. I was lost, stuck in this cosmic loss of self.
Back and forth, it waved. Easing toward the light, toward the presence of something , forward to the concept of being , the pain swept in harder and faster. Piercing rays of agony speared through me. Aching streaks of injuries and inflammation roused me further from the drugging nothingness, but the closer I came to fully embracing the faculty of my senses, I was pushed back, falling and flailing toward the pit of emptiness, dark and bleak.
It wasn’t constant, volleying to and fro. Pushed to wake up, I recognized every impact of pain that I’d received. And shoved back to sleep, forever, I let go of the awareness that I should stay alive, that I should fight to escape this blackness.
In short spells, I registered more than the reality that I wasn’t dead.
Sounds trickled into my consciousness. All of them sounded far away and underwater, indistinguishable and distant. Booms in the sky? Footsteps approaching. A car door slamming? Was someone near?
Wanting to know where I was motivated me to cling harder to the pain that threatened to wake me. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t backtrack to where I had been. Lying flat, with something hard and steady beneath me, I could only try to breathe.
But then even that changed, too quickly for me to keep up with when I was under this dizzying nothingness of the dark. I was moving. No. I wasn’t moving. I was being moved. The pressure of hands on my body was unmistakable. The rising sensation of being pulled onto a softer flat surface was something I could follow. Another urge to sleep took over, though, and I couldn’t tell where I’d gone or how.
Motion stayed constant, then not. The dead weight of my body rocked forward, then swayed back, implying I was being transported on something. I certainly wasn’t walking.
Where am I?
Where am I going?
Who is there?
Who…
Panic spiked. That question arrested me, overwhelming my weak ability and energy to figure out what was happening and what would come.
With a stark, horrific clarity, I realized that I had no clue. I was clueless of something everyone should know.
Who am I?
Searching for my identity, I felt the rise of confusion control me.
I didn’t know.
No name came to mind. No memories flooded in. Not a single damn thing filed through my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure who I was. What I was called. Where I’d come from and how I’d happened to be thrust into this damning, twisting, and unbeatable dark void.
What the hell is going on?
Knowing what seemed like a smaller problem. Not understanding who I was freaked me out in a sense of being lost that no one could ever overcome.
Movement ceased again, but this time, the rumbling, vibrating noise that buoyed me on this cushioned surface made more sense.
I didn’t know who I was, but I understood that I was in a vehicle of some kind. It had stopped, and the rush of air that came in to breeze over my skin followed the squeak of a door opening.
The sensation of feeling like I was hovering over myself, in the air and trying to spy down on what was happening, wasn’t calming my frantic mind.
Am I dying?
Have I already died?
The limbo of when life switched into death wasn’t anything I had experience with. Right now, no previous experiences of a lifetime could comfort me. It wasn’t a total lack of awareness. In my soul, I knew what I was. A man. An adult. Everything else was a foggy detail that remained out of my reach.
Those cool hands reached for me again, and I was tugged out of the vehicle. Drops came with the passage into the air, and in the distance, those booms heralded like explosions in the sky.
Fireworks? It had to be, spaced out and sounding so high. I hadn’t lost my mind. Not entirely. I was cognizant of things, like cars and fireworks, but my identity remained elusive. A mystery I couldn’t solve.
Closer, though, her voice returned. In the murkiest wisps of awareness and waking up, I’d heard her soft, delicate voice.
Who was she? Why was she here? What happened?
“It will be okay.”
It will? I wanted to be blind and take a leap of faith to just believe her, but how could I? When nothing, not even my identity, was familiar, how could I rely on what a stranger said?
Is she a stranger?
Who is she?
Who am I?
The more she struggled to transport my immobile deadweight, with me trapped in my mind, more hits of pain reached me. She dropped me, and the jarring impact seared my skin that was already injured. She struggled to hold me, putting too little support on the weaker portions of my body. It wasn’t a graceful maneuver, and I flashed in and out of consciousness until I could speak.
“Who are you?”
I knew it was my voice. I didn’t know how that was familiar and could ground me, but it did. This was my voice, croaky and stiff.
“Sofia,” she replied, still sounding so sweet and calm, melodic with clear concern in her reply.
“What do you want from me?” I struggled to wake up faster, to open my eyes as the cool air wafted over my skin.
“I will help you,” she replied, unhurried and certain. She’d said it a few times, and again, I wanted to believe she would, that I wouldn’t be as completely lost with her aid.
Like an angel, looking over me.
I frowned, registering what those fireworks had to mean.
This woman’s voice was all I could focus on, but I didn’t know which woman would be the one to offer me comfort. I’d had a woman close to me before, but that was so long ago.
Another blast went off in the sky. A firework?
Alboradas.
It had to be the first of December. It was Christmastime. How I could recall that, but nothing else, should have alarmed me further, but I took comfort in being able to sleuth out something , no matter how trivial. It had to mean more would come back to me. It had to signify progress, but as I realized the sticky liquid dripping from my head had to be blood— my blood—I let myself drift back into the warmth and comfort of sleep again. Lured to rest and not think, I fell once more into a deeper rest.
Only one semi-coherent idea drifted through me.
Angel.
I had no clue what happened to me or what would come next, but I had found my Christmas angel to keep me from sinking into this nothingness and fear that I was alone.