36 hours later

I was on page 196 of The Brief History of The Dead by Kevin Brockmeier when the world changed. It looked the same but everything was different.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. Friday morning, I scared a petrol station attendant when I appeared at the cash register, red-rimmed around the eyes and shaking. He obviously thought I was on something, and wouldn't take my money directly from me, and tossed me the cigarettes I clutched in trembling hands like a lifeline. I left rubber at a set of stoplights getting back because I was drowning, unable to breathe unless it was through the medium of a cigarette.

The Raj was there in my first tottering steps in this new world, while smoke curled in my hair. Then sleeplessness and the urgent, desperate need to remember, and then the boys shepherded me for the rest of the day, delivering me safe to the airport.

It is as though my body has forgotten how to function on its most basic level. I haven't slept in 48 hours because I can't. In the past 36 hours, the only things I've managed to eat were a plum and half a peach. Half because I found myself chewing slower and slower until I just stopped, and I couldn't swallow what I had in my mouth.

Nicotine is an essential, because it seems like I have forgotten how to breathe. I remember to inhale to make the tip of my cigarette glows orange, then on exhale, the smoke comes roiling out of my lungs. I try not to think about what my lungs look like at the moment. The inside of my mouth tastes like ashes and scattered around my garden and the riverside are the remains of 31 cigarettes, each one lit from the end of the other in a daisy chain of artificial respiratory aids.

I cannot tell the time. It seems to have slowed immeasurably. I sat in the garden and chain-smoked 3 cigarettes and somehow it was only 6 minutes and I still didn't remember how to make the muscles in my body work, so I just sat, breathing through cigarettes while the sun came up.

I have forgotten how to feel. I find myself mentally probing delicately at concepts, memories, perspectives with great caution, like a tongue on an abscessed tooth, ready to abort mission in the event of extreme pain. But nothing is getting through. The lines are down, there is no dial tone. I keep waiting to feel something, anything. But, no.

The world is changed, and I am still here.

And I wish I wasn't.