Lindsey OConnor - The Long Awakening: A Memoir

I DO NOT REMEMBER the day, the moment, I first remembered who I was or what was my life.

Before I was pulled back from the deep of a forty-seven-day sleep, before I understood what had happened while I slept or that I had slept at all, before the moment I saw his face leaning close to mine and before the long journey after my waking when I lost my way and myself, I knew where, who, I was. Other things, however, take a season to know.

On a crisp fall day in 2002 the whiteboard on the wall to the left of the sliding glass doors reads Today is October 15th. Your nurse is Marsha, written with the hasty scrawl of a busy ICU nurse, but I am oblivious.

Honey? he says. Can you hear me?

Do I hear him? Or am I dreaming his voice?

I dont know whats real or whats not. Im lying in the black sense-deprived place of preconsciousness, the tiny space between dreaming and waking. But I dont leave. I linger.

I hear muffled sounds, voices, then they fade away into a faint ringing sound that rises like bubbles hitting eardrums as you sink below the surface; I am underwater, floating in the sea of alter-consciousness, bobbing in preawareness, an incorporeal, matter-less, drifting existence.

Days, weeks later I will remember the sunny day when I was sixteen at summer camp in Texas floating down the Alto Frio river. At a sharp bend the flowing water hit a cement embankment. I floated downstream toward it and saw my fellow campers sitting on the sidewalk a few feet above the waters surface. As I reached the wall, before I could grab the edge and hoist myself up, the undercurrent grabbed me, pushed me under. I could see the obscure image of my friends above. Quit fighting, I thought. Let the river sweep me downstream. Ill pop up if I dont fight. I surrendered to the water until my lungs ached. I might die, I thought.

I kick, reach up once more, then a hand reaches into the water, grasps mine, pulls me up. Its unforgettable to see the surface from underwater, the dark below you, light filtering above, trapped in between, floatingdont fight itthen longing to break the surface and breathe, out of the water into life. Like the Alto Frio, like a baby, like a coma, like the watery edges of dreams. On this 2002 autumn day I dont resist. Dont fight it. Until I hear a faraway deep-timbered voice, strong and soft, as familiar to me as my own. A voice that is warmth, a hundred summer days, and I am winter. I am drawn, pulled, to the warmth. Rescued from the depth.

It is this voice that pierces the edges of my waking.

Honey, can you hear me? Tim says with an urgency I dont understand, a near excitement. I do. Of course I can hear you, I think. Why wouldnt I?

Then I see him, this man I married, this man I love, moving toward me and bending close, his square jaw, his blue-green eyes, soft, coming into focus. My fingertips inch across wrinkled white sheets, then touch cold metal holding me in bed while wisps of cool air swirl around my neck, foreign and out of place, and a rhythmic mechanical sound whooshes in, out, in, out, inhale, exhale, amidst the smell of plastic and antiseptic.

Hi, honey! he says and strokes my hair, eyes locked on mine with a peculiar look on his face, intent, unusual, an expression that looks very much like... what? Like... devotion. Like the way hed looked down at me the night wed said goodbye after our wedding rehearsal dinner. Devotion that says delight and love and joy without a word. It startles me.

Its the kind of look you see in the movies when the hero locks eyes with the heroine from across the room, strides toward her, drawn like a magnet. Before the movie kiss, before the embrace or the passion or declarations of love, the guy gazes at the girl. You sit in the theater putting one kernel of popcorn after another in your mouth until that look and you stop, kernel midair. In your real married life amidst kids and a mortgage and chicken casserole and weed mitigation, you latch on to date night and laugh, make love often enough, and you live your big beautiful ordinary life where in between and after the fights that are also part of your ordinary wonderful life, you feel love like you never imagined at twenty-two or twenty-four. But whats not there, what youve stopped expecting, is that look and when you see it onscreen it catches you by surprise and you sort of soundlessly catch your breath.