Forever Night Stand (TheWriteAffair Finalist)

Chapter 1: PRE-OBLIVION

I could feel the sunlight trying to penetrate my closed eyelids. I must have overslept. The bed felt like a cocoon, wrapping its warm sheets around me, burying me in fuzzy darkness.

The room I was in looked cold and impersonal with its white walls and lush furniture. There were machines all around. A screen with numbers running across it, a line jolting up and down and that beeping, the sound that just wouldn't stop.

I tried to get up, but my limbs wouldn't obey me, so I just sagged back into bed. My brain was sluggish and slow. My groggy mind noticed something strange. How the sheets felt thin and stiff, not like my sheets at all. How my body ached when I made even the slightest move. How my throat felt dry as a desert.

"He's awake!" Mikael's voice echoed in my head.

A man entered the room with hurried steps, striding straight towards me. He had a clipboard in one hand and a concerned, yet hopeful look on his face.

"Water, please." I managed to croak out through a sore throat, my voice sounding twisted and cracked. Agata who was standing beside me burst into tears. The man in the white coat nodded and poured me a glass of water from the sink behind him.

"Welcome back, Ivo. You've been in a coma for six weeks."

I thought I was in the recovery room after the surgery. I thought the procedure had gone fine and I'd just woken up, but no, I just lost six weeks.

I gradually became more and more aware of what was going on around me. My memory of things that happened shortly after I woke up is a little jumbled with things that I imagined happening as well.

When I would wake up in my head, I could feel Brandy holding my hand. I tried as hard as I could to squeeze her hand and I could feel it doing absolutely nothing. When she let go to walk away, I was completely devastated. I called for her to stay, but obviously, nothing happened. I attempted to move, I struggled to speak, I strived to scream but I couldn't.

I was brought out of the coma. I was finally awoken from the darkness that enveloped my mind. Memories from before the accident would come in flashes: flowers, Brandy in a wedding dress with her loving eyes, and pain. Pain was always the last memory before the darkness returned. It should have been that day, the moment of truth, but the accident got in the way.

The next day, some doctors came in and asked me several questions. They asked me if I knew where I was, and I tried to say yes. They asked if I remembered why I was here and again I nodded. I remember periods of nothing, peppered with little snippets. Trying to communicate with them while intubated and drugged was very difficult.

From there I remained conscious but sedated, and have rather intact memories from that point on. Slowly, muscle movement came back to me. A week passed and I was up and moving on my own with the help of a walker. I still felt dizzy occasionally, my children helped me out the best they could and was always by my side to give me support.

Two agonizing weeks flew by yet I was still confined.

I asked my son Mikael to get the journals from my office. I wrote my last journal entry and recorded everything I could remember. No better way revealing to them what their mother and I went through by means of reading our journals.

I had to let them know the truth.

"I want you to both read these."

Mikael gazed over at me skeptically for a brief moment. He raised a brow. "What are those for?"

"You'll find out," I said as I handed over Brandy's journals to Agata. "I want you to start with the pink one."

Agata took the journals with clear uncertainty written on her face. She began flipping through the pages. "Whose journals are these, Dad?" she asked while doing so.