the doctor's voice still echoed in debil moreyen's head long after he left the hospital:
"ten days, maybe less. your body's tired of being a body."
he didn't cry. he laughed a slow, shaky, stupid laugh that made the nurse look at him like a man who'd just found comedy in a funeral brochure. maybe he had. after all, ten days was plenty. some people spent more time deciding what to watch on netflix.
the air outside smelled like cold asphalt and burnt sugar from the street vendors. autumn in eastern europe had that particular texture gray light folded over gray buildings, and the wind that always seemed to carry other people's conversations. debil lit a cigarette with hands that trembled like guilty priests.
"ten days," he muttered. "that's enough to become a legend or a meme."
the thought comforted him for about twelve seconds.
he went home a narrow apartment that smelled faintly of paint thinner and unwashed philosophy. the walls were full of books and unpaid bills; he liked to think they balanced each other out. he sat by the window, staring at the city as if it owed him an explanation. what did you do with ten days? repent? travel? call your ex and apologize for everything, including existing?
nah. he reached for the drawer and pulled out the small glass vial wrapped in paper like a relic.
a mix of dissociative and psychedelic compounds the kind that didn't just blur the line between real and unreal, but erased it completely and redrew it with crayons.
"let's make reality interesting," he whispered.
the first inhale was always the hardest not because of the taste, but because it felt like betrayal. the body always protested before it surrendered to the imagination. the room swayed softly, the walls flexing like lungs. the cigarette smoke turned to ribbons of silver thought. time stopped trying to act linear.
then something… clicked.
at first, it was subtle: the sound of the refrigerator humming turned into a low chant, repeating the same rhythm as his heartbeat. the pattern of light on the floor shaped itself into a map he couldn't read it, but he knew it meant something. his mind, freshly unlocked, began making connections faster than his fear could stop them.
words started breathing.
the wallpaper whispered, "you are inside the metaphor now."
and just like that, he wasn't sitting in his apartment anymore. the walls had peeled into sky, the floor had liquefied into sentences, and the air the air was meaning. he floated in a landscape woven from comparisons: a tree that was also a clock, a cloud that was also a memory, and a street that led to the heart of a word he couldn't pronounce.
he laughed again. it sounded both human and not.
"so this is it," he said. "metaphor as physics."
"more like physics as a metaphor," replied a voice behind him.
he turned.
she stood there barefoot, with a grin that looked borrowed from a dream that had forgotten its purpose. hair like melted dusk, eyes that shimmered between amber and smoke. she wore an oversized coat that said nothing matters in ten different ways.
and somehow, debil knew her name before she spoke it.
"cendy malckhome," she said, bowing dramatically, "psychological representation of your inner resilience, humor, and unresolved grief. also, i might be death. depends on your level of denial."
debil blinked. "you rehearsed that introduction?"
"every time someone almost dies, i get to practice. occupational hazard."
he snorted. "so… you're my brain's coping mechanism?"
"sure," she shrugged, "if that helps you not panic. or maybe i'm the part of you that doesn't care about dying. hard to say. we overlap a lot in this business."
she started walking though "walking" was generous. it was more like gliding through metaphorical gravity. the landscape shifted with her movements; trees turned into phrases, the ground into memories. each step bent meaning itself.
"so what now?" debil asked.
"ten days to die," she said lightly. "ten chapters to make sense of it. i'm here to keep you company and, if necessary, to make sarcastic remarks when you start getting too poetic."
he smiled weakly. "i think i already like you."
"of course you do," cendy said, glancing at him with a playful half-smile. "i'm literally made of the parts of you that you like."
they walked if you could call it that through a field of shifting idioms. in the distance, a mountain formed from all the things debil had ever said and half-meant. rivers ran with unspoken apologies. a bird flew overhead and left behind a trail of questions.
"what happens if i stay here too long?" he asked.
"same thing that happens if you stay anywhere too long," cendy said. "you start confusing metaphor with truth. dangerous habit, even for the dying."
"and if i leave?"
"then you wake up, throw up, and realize that enlightenment tastes like cheap chemicals and regret."
he laughed again not because it was funny, but because it was honest.
as they walked, he noticed that the horizon was curving inward, folding gently toward them. it wasn't the sky bending, but meaning itself rearranging around his consciousness. the world was no longer built from atoms but from associations, and every thought reshaped the landscape.
it was terrifying. it was beautiful.
he sat down beside cendy on a rock that was probably an emotion. she offered him a cigarette made of cloud.
"you know," she said softly, "the brain's a funny thing. it doesn't want truth. it wants stories. and right now, you're giving it the best one it's ever had."
"does it end well?"
"that depends on whether you can say goodbye without hating me."
debil exhaled slowly. the smoke rose, twisted, and became a word in the air acceptance.
he smiled, tired but amused. "you talk like a therapist and a bartender had a child."
"accurate," she said. "except the child grew up in your frontal lobe."
they both laughed and for a brief, impossible moment, everything was okay.
the fear was still there, curled up like a quiet animal, but it wasn't hungry anymore.
the sky turned to paper, the wind became syntax, and the world whispered in a thousand tongues that all meant the same thing:
welcome to day one.