Between the Living and the Leaving

"They say waking up means you're alive. But sometimes it feels like the real dying starts after you open your eyes."

I surfaced through layers of chemical sleep like swimming up through honey, through amber, through years of accumulated silence. Not awake, not asleep, but suspended between—the place where anaesthesia leaves you, where you can hear everything but respond to nothing, where time moves like cold treacle.

Voices filtered through the pharmaceutical haze:

"—lost a lot of blood—"

"—baby's in the NICU—"

"—psychiatric evaluation when she—"

"—tell the husband—"

The husband. Noah. I tried to remember his face but could only see the wooden cross at his neck, swinging like a pendulum, counting moments I'd never get back.

My body wasn't mine. It was a geography of interventions—tubes and wires and sutures. I could feel the absence where they'd pulled the baby from me, a hollow space like a room someone had lived in and left, taking all the furniture. The wound they'd sewn shut was screaming, but distantly, like hearing neighbours argue through walls.

Someone was adjusting something near my head. A nurse, maybe Margaret, maybe all nurses who were secretly one eternal nurse. Her hands were gentle, competent, and I wanted to tell her: I know you know. You all know. You see women like me every day, the ones who break rather than bend, who shatter rather than stretch.

But my mouth wouldn't work. The anaesthesia had stolen my words, or maybe I'd never had the right words. How did you explain that pregnancy felt like being colonised? That your body had been annexed by foreign forces? That you were an occupied territory long before the baby, that this was just the latest invasion?

"Her eyes are open," someone said, alarmed.

Yes, my eyes were open. They'd been open since I was seven, watching the ceiling while my body learned to leave itself. Open but not seeing, or seeing too much, or seeing things that weren't there but were more real than what was.

The room kept shifting. Sometimes it was the recovery ward with its green walls and medical smell. Sometimes it was my childhood bedroom with pink wallpaper and a door that didn't lock. Sometimes it was both, overlapped like double-exposed photographs, each room ghosting through the other.

"Heather? Can you hear me?" A man's voice, doctor-gentle, doctor-distant.

I could hear him but I was also hearing other voices, other times someone had asked if I could hear them. The anaesthesia was wearing off unevenly—some parts of me waking while others stayed under, like a house where lights turned on room by room but never all at once.

My throat was raw. Had I been screaming? While they cut me open, while they pulled him out, had I been screaming all the things I'd never screamed? Or was my throat raw from the tube they'd put down it, another thing entering me without permission, even if it was to keep me breathing?

"The baby's doing well," someone said, like that was supposed to comfort me. "Strong lungs. Fighter."

Fighter. They always said that about premature babies, like being born too early was a battle to win rather than an eviction to survive. He was fighting to breathe because I'd tried to cut him free. We were both fighters, both victims, both perpetrators of the violence that created him.

I tried to move my hand but it was weighted with IVs, with restraints—no, not restraints, just the heaviness of anaesthesia, but it felt the same. Everything felt like being held down. Even consciousness was a kind of prison, a box I couldn't think outside of.

The clock on the wall showed 9:23, but I didn't know if that was morning or night, didn't know how long I'd been under, didn't know if time was moving forward or if I was stuck in a loop where it was always the nineteenth of July, 1984, where I was always thirty-four weeks pregnant, where I was always about to break.

"She's crying," someone said, and I realised it was true. Tears were sliding down my temples into my hair, but I didn't feel sad. I felt nothing, which was its own kind of sadness. The tears were just biology, just ducts responding to stimuli, just another thing my body did without my consent.

A machine beeped steadily, monitoring something—my heart probably, though I wasn't sure I still had one. Maybe they'd removed it along with the baby. Maybe that's why I felt so hollow, so echoey, like a house after the movers had gone.

Someone was explaining something about blood loss, about transfusions, about how lucky I was. Lucky. The word was absurd, a joke without a punchline. Lucky to have survived what I'd done to myself. Lucky to be sewn back together. Lucky to be returned to a life I'd tried to leave.

"Has she seen the baby?" A woman's voice, concerned.

No, I hadn't seen him. Didn't want to see him. He was probably pink and wrinkled and needy, another mouth demanding to be fed, another pair of hands reaching for what I didn't have to give. But also—also I was curious about what we'd made, violence and I. What did trauma look like when it was born premature? What colour were his eyes—Noah's blue or my green or something entirely new, the colour of things that shouldn't exist?

The halothane was still in my system, making everything shimmer slightly, making the edges of things uncertain. Was that my hand or someone else's? Was that my heartbeat or the baby's, piped in through some speaker? Was I twenty-two or seven or both or neither?

"We need to talk about what happened," someone was saying, but they were talking about the wrong thing. They wanted to talk about today, about the glass, about the blood. They didn't want to talk about what really happened—the first violation that made all other violations possible, the crack in my foundation that made the whole house unsafe.

I could feel myself being pulled back toward full consciousness, toward the pain that was waiting for me there, toward the reality of what I'd done and what had been done to me. Part of me fought to stay in this twilight place where nothing was solid, where I could dissolve at the edges, where I didn't have to be any particular person in any particular body.

But anaesthesia was temporary. It always wore off. You always had to come back to yourself, to your body, to your history that lived in your cells. You always had to wake up and remember that you were still you, still here, still carrying everything you'd tried to cut away.

"Luke," I said, or tried to say. The word came out wrong, more breath than sound, but someone heard.

"The baby? You want to know about the baby?"

I didn't want to know. I already knew the shape of it. He was alive, he was separate from me now, he was beginning his own story that started with violence but might not end there. And I was already afraid of the mother I would be to him—that I would flinch when he reached for me, that what I had to give would feel like absence, that he would learn the word "family" as a wound. I couldn't see the future. I could only feel it leaning toward me.

They would tell him he came early, eager to be born—I could hear the gentle lie already taking shape in their mouths. No one was going to tell him he'd been cut from me, that his first breath tasted of his mother's blood. The secret was closing over him the way it had closed over me, and I was too far under to stop it.

The anaesthesia was lifting like fog, and with it came the pain—not just physical but the older pain, the foundational pain, the pain that had been waiting patiently for me to return to it. It welcomed me back like an old friend, familiar and terrible and mine.

Somewhere in this hospital, Luke was learning to breathe. Somewhere in this hospital, Noah was learning to be both parents at once. Somewhere in this hospital, Margaret was remembering to forget what she'd seen.

And here, in this room that was sometimes a recovery ward and sometimes a childhood bedroom and sometimes both, I was learning that some births are also deaths, that some women are ghosts haunting their own lives, that some secrets carve themselves into skin and can never be fully sutured.

The clock now read 9:47. Time was moving forward after all. Even when everything in me wanted it to stop. Even when every cell in my body was trying to run backward. Even when—

"Heather?" Someone was calling my name. "We're going to give you something for the pain."

Another needle, another chemical promise of escape. But I knew better now. There was no escape, only intermissions. Only these spaces between consciousness where you could pretend, briefly, to be free.

The medication slid into my veins like a cool whisper, and I let myself fall back toward the darkness, toward the place where I wasn't anyone's mother, anyone's wife, anyone's victim.

But even as I fell, I knew I would have to wake up again. We always have to wake up again. That's the real tragedy—not that we break, but that we survive our breaking. Not that we shatter, but that someone always insists on gluing us back together. Not that we fall, but that we're caught before we hit the bottom.

The darkness rose to meet me, and I sank into it gratefully. Tomorrow would come with its own demands. But for now, for these few chemical hours, I could pretend to be nothing. I could pretend to be free.