Page 40 of Scorched Hearts

After a tiring wave of pain in her temples, she felt transported to an abandoned-by-her-consciousness beach. The white sand tickled her feet, the ocean’s waves came and went in a constant whisper. The image brought her much solace, remembering the quiet morning hours, the rustling of the tent’s walls when she would sneak away to run along the beach, lit by the early sun, licked by the tongues of waves.

For a long time, she didn’t feel like a person, but rather a river of memories. The events of her life didn’t seem to bear any connection to each other. Indeed, she couldn’t think of trying to look for one. Instead, in a manner similar to that of dreams, they transported her from one place to another without any clear purpose, and the only thing she could do was to accept that as her reality, watch, as what had already unraveled did so again. Her mind existed as an eternity. There was no beginning of that state in her memory, and since she couldn’t remember any other state of being, there was no reason for her to expect an end.

Some scenes she was thrust into troubled her, while others brought comfort. An exhausting slither of pain from her head down to her legs paralyzed Elle’s thoughts for a moment, but soon it stopped mattering. Her hands were set firmly against a wooden surface. Her voice seemed to be raised, angry, but she couldn’t understand why. Warm, dim light was falling down on her from a ceiling lamp. There was another person in the room. Her voice was equally as angry, like a storm hitting rocks on the shore.

“How could you have lied to me?”

“Fuck.” Elle felt her hands go up to her temples, massaging them. She felt stressed. “It meant nothing, I told you already. I was drunk. It meant nothing.”

“It meant something to me, Elle. Does that matter to you, still? And on top of everything, you lied straight to my face more than once!”

Elle’s legs carried her around the room. She was only a spectator, observing from inside of her head. The words made their way out on their own. “What choice did I have? We can just move on from this, pretend it didn’t happen.”

The other person shook her head. Elle could see tears flowing down her face in little streaks.

“Maya,” she said, coming up to her.

“I don’t want to be with someone who is so casual about disrespecting me. If you can’t stick to simple agreements, that truly shows your selfishness, Elle. And you know you can be selfish,” Maya went to another room, out of sight.

Elle collapsed on the couch. Its softness contrasted with the sharp tangle of feelings tightening in her chest. She felt trapped within herself. She wanted to escape this place. She felt that the situation would not end well, would not be resolved within that room, and that weighed heavily on her.

But then she began slipping away, her consciousness melting into the familiar velvet black fabric of nonexistence, of pause in thought. The warmth of its embrace comforted her, carried her away from the pain of her body, high and far away, leaving her body behind, her heavy limbs too weighty for her consciousness to drag away with it. And then she sank into a state of non-being, without dreams or memories, without thought or perception. Only the body’s mechanical rhythms remained, its steady rise and fall with each breath and exhale, and its ceaseless heartbeat, never abandoning its march onward.

She heard a mingling of sounds to the left. It took her some time to recognize the strings of sounds as voices, of various pitches and rhythms. For a while, it amused her to hold the threads of these voices in her mind. Not quite sure what she was supposed to do with them, she squeezed and stretched them out, felt the way they reached her. Some had a fuzzy quality to them, some more slick and oily, some raspy. She felt them nest in her mind, echo around or plunge deep.

Out of their nets emerged something she recognized only later, how the threads could be divided into chunks, little words. Uncovering the words brought her much amusement, every one word carried some image with it, like connecting tissue, like glue making collages out of the images.

Soon, she understood that the collages brought emotions with them, or new sets of memories. Like wagons, they created sentences, and the sentences played around with each other, bumped against each other like in a game of football. She made the space of her mind into a playing field, watched the threads of sounds knit words, words be glued into sentences, and the sentences be carried by trains of thought. Sometimes her understanding would be derailed. Sometimes there were too many sounds for her to follow. With time, however, out of the fog emerged full conversations.

“Will she ever fully recover?”

“The doctors aren’t saying anything definitive yet.”

“Is it true that her ex operated on her?”

Her ex carried something very emotional in it. Her thoughts stirred with a new substance in them, creating abstract patterns that soon descended into the reality of memories. She retrieved the figure of Maya from her memory.

The image of the living room anger floated back, as did many others. A warmth against her chest. A soothing voice. Recalling Maya brought a sudden richness to her thoughts, laden with feelings of various flavors. The recollections awakened her mind, and soon something overwhelming happened—she remembered the way to lift her eyelids, and a flood of light hurt her eyes.

“Oh my God, look! She’s awake!” O’Malley pointed her finger at Elle, who, for the first time in days, regained consciousness and was now trying to process what had happened.

“Don’t point fingers, that’s rude.” She smiled weakly.

The group of firefighters were on the verge of jumping for joy, hearing her voice. They started talking over each other, each having a question to ask, each wanting to tell Elle something important. She scanned the faces jumping around her and noticed a significant lack.

“Does Maya know I’m here?” she asked, her voice painfully weak.

Her friends looked around each other, concerned and whispering. Someone ,should probably call in the nurse. She doesn’t sound well. Johnson ran out to get someone. Captain Ramirez stepped closer to Elle, touching her hand with care.

“Maya was a part of the team who drove you here.” She smiled. “She stayed in the waiting room for a long time before going back to her duties. We’ll call her to come here as soon as she can for sure.”

Elle blinked, surprised. “How do you two know each other?”

“We got to know each other here, actually, in the hospital visiting you.” She nodded. “She’s a really nice woman, Elle.”

Elle’s eyes teared up, so she twisted her head so as not to seem dramatic. Ramirez tactfully stepped back a little and looked away.

“Elle, you looked horrible when we got you out of the building, for real,” Haley said, closing the door. “The nurse is on her way.”

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