It’s very dark, and I can’t move. I feel like maybe screaming for help and begging for escape from the emptiness, but at the same time I also want to curl up and forget everything that was ever light or bright and make the pain go away. It hurts… my chest, my throat, my lungs as air presses in and out, my legs, my eyes… It all feels banged and bruised, and maybe a little bit burnt, raw and itchy in that way that you can’t scratch because you can’t find it and even if you could, it would just pave the way for more pain.

“...doubt she’ll wake up now, Ms. Larch.”

A voice appears, and I feel the urge to speak, feel the words curl in my throat, but my mouth is closed and my vocal cords are dry and unused and even if neither of those were true, my body is ignoring everything I’m telling it to do. Maybe I should panic at that. Maybe I am panicking.

Then again, if the latter is true, then I’ve been panicking in here for days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, forever and a day in the black, so no change there. This was supposed to be over faster. This was supposed to be instantaneous.

“And that’s your honest opinion, Dr. Tam?” someone asks, quiet and defeated and helpless. “You really think she’s a lost cause?”

“There’s no evidence to say otherwise,” Dr. Tam says gently. He sounds sorry. He probably is. It can’t be easy, being a doctor. Having to break the news to grieving lovers, parents… siblings.
Ms. Larch--Tanya, I know her voice like I know my own--sounds a little choked as she mumbles, “Can I, um… I mean… a moment alone, please? W-with my sister?"

There is only silence in reply. Perhaps Dr. Tam nodded, because the next thing I hear is a curtain swishing closed and a chair being dragged across the floor.

“Well, sis…” Tanya whispers tremulously. “I guess this it, huh?” She laughs, and it sounds a bit hysterical, filled with disbelief. “You always said you’d go first. You laughed when you said it, joking around as you climbed a taller tree, jumped from a bigger rock, planned a more dangerous prank. Kat…” She swallows audibly, and I can almost see her. It’s like looking in a mirror, or maybe at a photograph, only not exactly because Tanya has longer hair and hers is still its natural brown. She never liked hair dye as much as I did. And she wears her contacts rather than buying ridiculously colorful and outrageous glasses. So maybe a photograph of me in a wig. Without my glasses. “Oh god, Katrina, Kitty-Kat, you never meant it when you said you’d go first!” She’s crying, I can hear it, and my ears are on fire because Tanya never cries. For all my tough talk, I’d always been the crier. Tanya was the serene one, the twin who kept it together and held me when I fell apart. “It was a car, a stupid car, you could have gotten out of the way! Oh, oh my god, you--you’re going to go, and I’ll be stuck here, all alone. And Mom! Mom will--will forget, she’ll forget that you’re gone, she’ll just keep forgetting, and I’ll have to explain to her why you aren’t visiting, and I’ll have to watch her fall apart every single time! And--” A great gulp of air is sucked into her throat before she continues. “And maybe one day she’ll start crying and forget why, in the middle of a breakdown just ask, ‘Why am I crying?’ and I won’t be able to do anything because she’s so sick and I don’t know how to make it better!” She’s sobbing now, great heaving breaths escaping cracked and contorted and edged with a low wail that might just be the ringing in my ears because Tanya is so strong and so brave and she doesn’t need me to be those things, she’s Tanya, she can do anything!

She doesn’t say anything else. Just sits there, whimpering, trying to contain the broken exhales, trying to manage her pain.

Then she’s gone, and there are doctors, and I know exactly what they’re doing, and isn’t this what I wanted? I stepped in front of that car, I knew what was coming. It was time. I wasn’t helping anyone. All I ever did was rip and tear and stomp on anything and everything that mattered to me until it was a broken, bleeding mess. I was a monster. I didn’t deserve to live.

But… what have I done to Tanya?

I’m so selfish.

I want to take it back now, but it’s already too late. The machines are being disconnected, and I’m going to be dead soon.

Any minute now.

Just a few more seconds.

I’m going to be