Waking up hurt.
Not physically—at first—but in the way silence hurts when you've grown used to noise.
My eyes opened to white light and unfamiliar angles. The ceiling had a crack shaped like a question mark. I stared at it longer than necessary, grounding myself in something solid.
A nurse noticed.
Everything after that blurred into fragments: voices, questions, the pressure of hands guiding me back when I tried to sit up too fast.
"Easy."
"You've been out for a while."
"Do you know where you are?"
I did.
That was the problem.
"You were in a coma," the doctor said later, calm and careful, like each word was being placed rather than spoken. "Eleven days."
Eleven days.
I searched my memory for emptiness.
Found none.
Outside the hospital, the city felt… edited.
Not destroyed. Not healed. Adjusted.
Repairs that looked rushed. Posters layered over older posters, slogans I didn't remember seeing before but somehow recognized. Conversations that paused when I walked past, then resumed with a different tone.
At a café near the exit, a television murmured above the counter.
The headline scrolling across the bottom made my stomach drop.
It was a sentence I remembered writing.
A sentence I was certain I had written after the accident.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
Notifications.
Comments.
On chapters I didn't remember uploading.
One message stood out.
This arc feels too real.
It's like the author stopped holding back.
I looked up at the city through the café window.
For the first time since waking, fear settled properly in my chest.
I hadn't stopped writing.
I had just stopped hesitating.
And somewhere—whether in a hospital bed, a blank page, or a version of myself that didn't doubt—
The world was still listening.