Page 5 of Penn

I wake. I see the blinding light dancing on the other side of my closed eyelids and dare not open them. There’s an indescribable pain in my face but my hands are either restrained or numb or they simply don’t exist anymore because I can’t for the life of me reach them up to touch where the pain is.

I can’t feel my lips, either, I realize. I can’t smell anything. I wonder if that is probably for the best. I have no sensation in my fingers or toes but I wonder if that’s only because there is nothing to feel there at the moment.

My breath moves through my chest and up into my throat and down deep into my abdomen so at least there’s that. At least I can breathe, and I can feel it.

And I can hear. There’s a steady beep, beep, beep. A pattering of movements, footsteps, machines being toggled on and off, curtains and beds adjusted this way and that, all of it seeming very deliberate. A bit of nearby conversation. Very nearby.

“Why didn’t you bring her to the hospital sooner?” my mother asks someone.

“She wouldn’t let me,” a man’s warm, confident voice replies to her. It’s the only sound here that feels equally foreign and familiar to me, nestling into the pit of my stomach and making me take a deep breath in.

“And if you show up to someone’s house with a stretcher and they refuse care, you just what,don’ttake them to the hospital?”

“That’s right ma’am. It rarely happens but—”

“She wasn’t in her right frame of mind.” Mom’s voice again.

“Thank God for this man,” someone else cuts in. A doctor? “In spite of their remote location, environment, and circumstance, Penn’s quick thinking put your daughter on the fast-track to a remarkable healing. Hearth still has a long way to go. But it would have been much worse.”

Hearth.

It’s strange to hear my name at all. It feels like it’s been forever since I heard it—How long have I been here? It’s even stranger to hear my name with all those other words he just said.Remarkable healing.Long way to go. AndPenn.

No, no. I made that part up. My overactive writer brain going haywire again. I’m in a hospital after obviously suffering some kind of trauma—I added up that much. I can’t trust my own judgment under the circumstances. But I swear he was real. What happened that night…it happened.

It happened just the way I remember it.

And so it begins: the long way to go. Pain and reality set in as the magic ofthat nightstarts to come back to me just as quickly as it starts to wear off. I remember it, alright. And it seems like so long ago. And then the days and weeks pass, and itisso long ago, and time takes the magic away with it.

I get used to the smell and the rhythm of the hospital. Mom shows me a picture of my face one day, looking like a mummy all wrapped in cloth. I ask if I still have that on my face and she says no, they were able to remove that once the skin healed over. I was brought in with a mix of mostly second-degree burns and very few, small spots of black, third-degree burns they had to scrape off. Um, gross. I’ve been on heavy antibiotics they can finally take me off of. I underwent multiple surgeries and skingrafts. They used skin from my butt cheek and inner thigh for the skin grafts, which must be why my butt hurts way worse than my face right now, and which I also didnotneed to know.

I’m going to look different. I already do, I guess. Mom asks if I’m ready to see my face yet, and I tell her no. I can see it enough on the nurses’ faces and the doctors’ faces. As for my mom, she has always been good at hiding pain and ugliness so there isn’t a trace of it on hers.

Time rolls over itself. I finally feel like I am starting to wake up from the longest sleep. I want to go outside. I want sunshine and fresh air and trees. Even if it means a hundred mosquitos attack me instantly, I’ll take it.

“Honey, it’s too cold to go outside.”

My heart leaps into my throat when Mom says that, my throat squeezing around it. Too cold…but it’s the middle of summer?

I want to burst into tears when I realize how long it’s been. Not weeks,months. I still dream of Penn. Still have visions of him visiting me. I was so sure he had been actually coming here for a while. I wondered why. Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe he always came back to check in on the people he saved.

“When…can I?” I ask, and before I can understand her answer, sleep takes me again.

I don’t remember much about the dream except that I see Penn, or do I only just hear his voice? And he tells me it’s all going to be alright. We’ll go on a real camping trip someday, together. He’s got something he wants to show me. He kisses me. Not on the lips, but the forehead, making me wish I were better at controlling my dreams.

Weirdest dream ever.

When I wake up, I must be on someheavypain meds because I feel decent enough to actually sit up in the hospital bed and write about my dream on the little laptop Mom broughtover for me. It’s a small miracle that I’ve always had horrible vision, plus I have always been too afraid of touching my eyes to wear contacts. So I had been wearing glasses the night of the accident, which literally saved my eyesight or I would never be able to write like this again. What would I do if I couldn’t write anymore? When I’m finished, I read over my words and they’re lovely, brilliant.

I reread it again the next day, in significantly more pain but sober now, and it’sawful. The worst writing I think I’ve ever written…Ever. Have I lost all good judgment, to have thought this wasgood? My face I will learn to live without. I wasn’t super gorgeous to begin with, and I had learned to love my body, with all its bigger curves and perceived imperfections, a long time ago. But to not be able toword?

God. This is all so hard. I want to be back in that tent. I want to be held by Penn and lied to the way he said everything was going to be okay when he dang well knew it was going to be so, so not okay. I want those sweet lies in that deep rumbling whisper he had.

I close the laptop and cry.

I try to stay optimistic. I’m lucky to be alive.

I’mlucky. Apparently.

---