Forty-Two Tiles
There are forty-two tiles on this ceiling. I have counted them over a dozen times. Isn’t the answer forty-two? I am here because I fear I have questioned the meaning of life too much. At least now I know the answer is not in fact, forty-two pills. Their bitter taste still lingers on the back of my tongue as endless apple juice containers litter the table. Sugar helps the medicine go down.
Such a miracle that I did not swallow them, or perhaps a more divine intervention. No, not God or anything of the sort, but something more ethereal. It was as though intangible hands of someone who has been here before scooped the pills from my mouth. Frigid whispers in my ear said I only need to call someone. How convenient, considering my phone is playing the soundtrack to my demise. When the abyss speaks, I listen.
This room is an echo chamber and colder than a cave. With the double-paned windows, it is more like an empty fishbowl. Ever present eyes on my prone body and half-dead mind; I am too numb to think. A curse and a blessing really. In the absence of thought, time becomes less linear. I travel in and out of consciousness amid the battery of questions from faceless figures that say they only want to help.
I have no choice but to let them. Much like a fish, I am unable to leave this place; nor do I possess the will. Instead, I dream fitfully during my bouts of slumber, about those that have laid in this bed before me, and those that never made it here. I even dream of those that will come after, because there will be an after. Perhaps those ethereal hands in my bathroom carried me here as they know something I do not. No person is ever so broken that they cannot be healed but there is no miraculous return from death.
So, here I lay, waiting to be carted off to another place to espouse my woes to complete strangers. Sure, I am lucky. Though what is luck when nothing feels real? What is luck but fate actualized? There I go, thinking again, letting my mind go round and round. At least the ceiling tiles have not disappeared. Yes, the answer is in fact forty-two.