Daughter: I wake up.
The waking is sudden, jarring, unpleasant. There is no pain. There is confusion and impersonal distress. I squint, blink. There! My dress! I know it, my favorite dress.
And I wait for warmth to creep into my vacant flesh. I wait to feel the warmth that has always hugged my heart, the warmth of happy familiarity. How well I know this fabric’s heft and complex weave. I know the making of this gown. I remember, stitch by tidy stitch, my silver needle quick amid the endless still and calm of summer afternoon. Nurse leans near. Her own needle draws her thread up and out, in and under, hours upon hours. Her knuckles are boney white; mine are hardly creased. I remember how the two of us lay out the length of heavy cloth, velvet woven from silk and gold, fabric arrived lately on my father’s ship, imported goods from far south, textiles bringing with them, my father tells me, nostalgically, the vibrancy of a more brilliant sun. He remembers travel, being then a young, ambitious, eager man. I will never travel but for once, one journey — one brilliant autumn week when my father escorts me to my wedding.
All this recollected warmth! Of contentment and sun, yet none of it touches me. I am not cold so much as I am void — mute, flat, without texture or light. Or warmth. Of all that is voided, what most affects me is to be without warmth.
But look. There. The dress. One of a kind. Nurse and I cut it from the only bolt of that particular fabric brought to northern shores. How can my dress be there when I am here? It occupies a dimension both near and unreachable. It lies in a heap covering over a slight body. And the body is me. It lies very still, and round about it madness churns. An agitated crowd. I cannot hear them. I cannot see them, except for tracers of action — arms, legs, open mouths — whooshing fields of vitality. Oh, the crowd is possessed by a pack of demons! No good will come of it.