Through Water, Through Walls

"The body has its own opinions about consciousness. Sometimes it decides you don't get a vote."

Sound first. Before anything else, before sight or sense or understanding—sound. A noise that came from somewhere outside the darkness, muffled and strange, like hearing through water, through walls, through years of accumulated silence.

Barking.

The word arrived late, trailing behind the sound it was meant to name. Barking. A dog. Charlie. The connections formed slowly, each one requiring effort, requiring a kind of reaching I didn't know I was still capable of.

Charlie was barking.

Why was Charlie—

The thought collapsed before it finished. Folded in on itself and disappeared, leaving only the sound, that urgent rhythmic noise that kept pushing against the darkness, kept insisting on something I couldn't give it.

And then cold. The floor was cold beneath me. That fact existed now, had materialised from somewhere, was pressing against my cheek with a reality I couldn't argue with. Cold and hard and wrong—I wasn't supposed to be on the floor. I was supposed to be somewhere else. Standing. Dancing. Something.

I tried to move.

Nothing happened.

The instruction left my brain—move, get up, lift your head—and vanished into a void where my body used to be. I could feel myself. Could feel the cold and the hardness and something else, something sharp pressing into my arm, my hip, places I couldn't name. But feeling wasn't the same as controlling. The connection had been severed somewhere along the way.

And the light—too much light, even through closed eyelids. Bright and harsh and buzzing—that sound, that particular hum, I knew it from somewhere. From before. From a place I didn't want to remember.

Fluorescent.

The word surfaced like something dead rising from deep water. Fluorescent lights. The kind they put in hospitals. In corridors where people walked in soft shoes and spoke in low voices and made decisions about women who couldn't make decisions for themselves.

No.

I wasn't there. I was somewhere else. The studio. I was in the studio, and the lights were on because I'd turned them on, because I'd come here to dance, because—

Because—

The thread slipped away. But something else took its place—a voice. Not the barking, something else. Human. Words that were trying to reach me, trying to deliver information I couldn't receive. The voice was high, tight, stretched thin over something that might have been fear.

"—Claire? Claire, can you hear me?"

I knew that voice.

The recognition was there, hovering just out of reach, a name I should have been able to produce but couldn't. Someone I knew. Someone who knew me. Someone who had found me here on the floor in the too-bright room with the glass and the cold and the—

"Oh God. Oh God, oh God—"

The voice cracked. Broke into pieces that scattered and reformed and didn't quite fit together anymore. I wanted to tell her it was fine. That I was fine. That she didn't need to sound like that, like something terrible had happened, like someone was hurt.

My mouth wouldn't open.

Or it was already open and nothing was coming out.

Or I was speaking and she couldn't hear me.

I couldn't tell the difference.

Then hands. Touching my face. My shoulder. Someone was touching me and I couldn't see who because my eyes wouldn't open or were open already and showing me nothing, just bright blur, just shapes without edges.

"Stay with me. Claire, stay with me, I'm calling—I'm going to—"

The hands left.

I felt their absence more clearly than I'd felt their presence. Cold air where warmth had been. The particular loneliness of a body that has been touched and then abandoned.

Charlie was still barking.

Closer now, or maybe I was just hearing better, the sound sharper and more defined. She was upset. She was trying to tell someone something. Dogs did that—they communicated, they warned, they raised alarms when things were wrong.

Things were wrong.

I understood that now, or was beginning to understand it, the knowledge assembling itself from fragments that kept drifting apart. Things were wrong and I was on the floor and someone was touching me and Charlie was barking and there was glass—

Glass.

I remembered.

The mirror. The phone. The throw. The shatter.

The dance.

The fall.

"Yes, ambulance. I need an ambulance. She's—I don't know, she's on the floor, there's glass everywhere, there's blood—"

The voice again. On the phone now, talking to someone else, words tumbling out too fast, tripping over each other. I tried to focus on it, tried to pull meaning from the rush of sound.

"—the dance studio behind the house. 86 Wills Street. Please hurry, I don't know if she's—I think she might have—"

A pause. The voice catching on something it couldn't say.

"I don't know. Pills maybe? There's a bottle here. I don't know how many she took."

Pills.

Yes.

I remembered that too. The bathroom cabinet. The Seroquel from 2010. The label with my name on it, proof of a time I'd spent eight years trying to forget.

She's not well. Anyone can see that.

Dawn's voice, surfacing from somewhere deep. From the before time. From the other collapse, the first one, when Mack was small and I'd fallen apart and they'd had to put me somewhere I couldn't hurt anyone, couldn't hurt myself, couldn't do anything but wait for the chemicals to rebalance and the world to stop tilting.

It was happening again.

The understanding arrived with a cold clarity that cut through everything else. It was happening again. I was back there, back in that place I'd sworn I'd never return to, and there was nothing I could do to stop it because I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything but lie here and let people make decisions about me.

"Claire? Can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."

The hands were back.

One of them was holding mine, fingers wrapped around my fingers, pressing gently. I could feel the warmth of her skin, the calluses on her palm—who had calluses? Someone who worked with their hands, someone who—

Denise.

The name dropped into place like a key into a lock. Denise. From the café. From the studio. From the conversation I'd forced on her, the awkwardness I'd created, the fees I'd demanded in a voice that hadn't sounded like my own.

Denise had found me.

I tried to squeeze her hand. Tried to send the signal that would tell her I was here, I was still inside this body, I hadn't completely gone away. But my fingers wouldn't cooperate. They lay in her grip like dead things, unresponsive, disconnected from the part of me that was still trying to reach her.

"That's okay. That's okay, you don't have to—help is coming, okay? Just hold on."

Her voice was different now. Still scared, but steadier. The voice of someone who had decided to be calm because calm was what was required, because panic wouldn't help, because there was a woman on the floor who needed her to hold it together.

I wanted to thank her.

Wanted to apologise for being this—for being the kind of person who ended up on floors, who shattered mirrors, who couldn't even manage consciousness properly. But the words were too far away and the darkness was too close and I could feel myself starting to slip again, to lose my grip on whatever thin ledge I'd managed to find.

The light was changing. Or my perception of it was changing—dimming at the edges, the brightness compressing into a smaller and smaller point. I was looking up at the ceiling, I realised. Had been looking at it this whole time, though I hadn't understood what I was seeing. The fluorescent tubes in their neat parallel lines, buzzing and burning, indifferent to what was happening beneath them.

The same lights.

The same lights as before, as the other time, as the room they'd put me in when I couldn't be trusted to put myself anywhere. Those lights had watched me then too. Had illuminated the bed I couldn't leave, the walls I couldn't escape, the door that only opened from the outside.

I wasn't there.

I was here. In the studio. My studio.

But the lights were the same and the feeling was the same and the hands were the same—people doing things to me, around me, making decisions I couldn't participate in because I'd lost the right to participate, had surrendered it somewhere along the way without knowing I was surrendering anything at all.

"Stay with me, Claire. The ambulance is coming. Just stay—"

Denise's voice, but fainter now. Further away. The darkness was rising, or I was sinking into it, the distinction no longer clear.

I tried to hold on.

Tried to find something solid to grip, some piece of consciousness I could anchor myself to. But everything was dissolving—the light, the sound, the cold floor against my cheek. All of it running together like watercolours in the rain, bleeding into each other, losing their shapes.

Charlie had stopped barking.

That was the last thing I noticed. The silence where her voice had been, the absence of that urgent alarm. She'd given up, maybe. Or someone had quieted her. Or she'd understood, in whatever way dogs understood things, that the warning had been received and there was nothing left to do but wait.

Poor Charlie.

Poor forgotten dog.

I'd meant to feed her.

I'd meant to do a lot of things.

The darkness rose up. Warm now, instead of cold. Soft, instead of hard. It wrapped around me like something that wanted me, that had been waiting for me, that knew exactly how to hold a woman who had lost the ability to hold herself.

I let it.

I let go.