A word in a shriek. Many more words.
She looked up.
Words and more words and more.…
Wait, she can't hear them anymore. Everything is moving. Lips, people, things. Yet she can't hear any of it.
Everything is moving. She is not. She is trying. She can’t.
Her limbs. They feel different. Light? Cold? Warm? Loose? Absent.
She sees everything yet her brain refuses to process her vision.
There's no air. She can't breathe.
Vacuum.
A moment. The longest moment her memory permits.
Years later, she will live this moment again. It wasn’t a shriek this time. It was three telephone rings.
And a few more years later, yet again. It wasn't a shriek or a ring. This time it was her name, in an unfamiliar tone, that led the words.
These vacuums never came alone.
There was always a predecessor moment when everything was unassumingly normal, that she would remember with uncanny precision every time her memory took her back to them.
And the succeeding moment when she was thrust into all the chaotic movement and sound around her, with her loose limbs and her sleeping voice gathering sudden voluntary momentum, without her conscious permission.
She never knew what to make of the vacuum.
Was it a monster holding her back too tight, suffocating her and forcefully shutting her ears rendering her mute, inanimate and deaf for the longest minute?
Or was it an angel of kindness, permitting her a moment of transit, devoid of every thing, every feeling, before her life changes forever?
Taking away a piece of her, leaving her broken forever, but gifting her a moment of numbness before she feels it?
A kind monster?
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