Sleep chokes me. I feel my eyes open through the stickiness, and close. I feel a scream whine from deep inside my stomach but I don’t let it leave my mouth. I felt like my whole body was on fire: but not the fire in a forest. Like everything was awake, while my mind was still asleep. The sheets on my arms feel like sandpaper, and my own weight on my back is like cinder blocks crushing me. 

I start to scream at myself. “Just get up already. How much longer do you need? We’ve slept more than enough!”

“What’s the point? There’s nothing to go back to.” 

“What are you talking about? What about Mom, Dad? The band? Don’t you love them?”

“I do!” I shift to the side. “I’ll see them eventually.” 

“Not this again-” I ball up my fists until I feel my nails poke my palms. “By the time you get up you’ll only get to see them a few hours, and you start to mope like the dumbass you are-”

After a while, hearing yourself screm over and over is tiring. I shut my eyes and drown out my own voice by remembering whatever it was I had been dreaming about earlier. I knew I had fallen asleep once the sound of the heart monitor stopped. 

It’s a lot easier to get out of bed when you need something. After my 3rd nap of the morning, my bladder chamber had nearly filled and I was hungrier than I had been the past few weeks. I got up, took a leak, and went downstairs, where my kidnappers waited for me. 

“Well, look who’s finally up!” Lucius says with the laugh uncles give when their nephews do something funny. I would say he’s the one I like the best, but it’s really just that I hate him the least. Linda smiles at me and grips the coffee mug in her hands. She’s never done anything wrong to me, per say, but she’s never done any good either. And at the end of the table sits the scrawny, white, bespeckled- head of the trio: Laurence.

“Ready to see your parents today?” He takes a long sip of his coffee. I feel my lip curl at his slurping. “I haven’t called them in yet; I figured you wouldn’t be conscious for a while.” Not like you wanted to call my parents in the first place, I thought. It took Linda and Lucius two days to finally convince Laurence to let my parents know I’m not actually dead. No one saw me get run over by that pickup truck, at least no one that I knew, anyway. I hate to think about it much, or else I’ll start thinking into a mindset I don’t want to get trapped in again. But, every once in a while, I wonder whether it would have been better if I had stayed dead.

Before the accident, I really wanted to die. Sabotaging yourself every day gets exhausting; at one point I didn’t want to keep fighting. In retrospect, the people I loved the most loved me more than I hated myself. It’s funny how self-loathing isolates you from those that want to help you. I don’t think I would have realized this until I had gotten hit by that car and got taken by the scientists, or my kidnappers, as I like to call them.