There Are No Stars Here
on being in a coma
There are no stars here, no horizon. The water is dark and still. I’m on my back, floating on an inner-tube. I know this because I can feel the water pooling over my stomach, that familiar feeling of it soaking me only from my ribcage to my thighs. The tube I’m floating on has holes in it. It’s deflating, losing air, but that doesn’t matter to me. My limbs are splayed like a broken doll. I can’t feel them, let alone move them. I just look at them. It ‘s like they aren’t even mine. My useless neck lolls my head back and forth in time with the gentle current. I try to look around, but there is no shoreline. The water is the exact same temperature as my body, an extension of my blood, my skin, my soul. And so, I lay there, drifting in the dark, gazing blankly upwards, at a sky that isn’t a sky. No moon, no stars. A dark abyss above me and a dark abyss below. Time doesn’t mean anything. It feels like I’ve always been here and always will be. The beginning and the end, playing endlessly on a loop.
Perhaps this is death.
This is the dream I remember most vividly. Actually, I don’t want to call them “dreams.” When my sister does mushrooms and all the trees on our block become “friendly moss monsters,” is that a dream? No, it’s a hallucination. It isn’t technically, physically real but it’s still an experience. That’s the category I’d put being in a coma in. Calling it all a dream diminishes the experience and obscures any meaning I might extract from it. And this is an area where I demand meaning. Because it changed me, fundamentally, irrevocably. It altered my brain, my subconscious, my understanding of what it means to live in a body, to be inside a mind, to be alive at all. I woke up a completely different person, a stranger. If other people can say they saw God on peyote, touched new galaxies on acid, or understood the connection of all living things on shrooms, then surely, I can claim this.
In another iteration of this dream loop, the water is choppy. I fight against the current. I swallow mouthfuls of liquid, and I scream them back out, lungs ripping, bursting at the seams, my tears mixing with the tepid water that has become all that I know. It feels like my body is encased in a net and I fight against this restraint. Soon I’m exhausted and I’m blindsided by pain. And in that moment, I know that I’ve lost, and I’m paralyzed. I feel myself sinking, sinking, sinking. Sinking so slowly that it's almost floating. And soon the pain is gone, I left it at the surface of this otherworldly lagoon. My body sinks with a surreal lifelessness; bones, muscle, and skin fading into a gray swirl of transparency. It’s comforting to finally surrender, to feel no pain, to let myself disappear. I’m gazing up out of the murky, rippling surface of the water.
There are no stars here.
Perhaps this is death.
I know all about what happens, biologically, in a medically induced coma: reduced brain activity, metabolic rate decrease, the effects of the drugs given to keep the patient resting in the void. I know our brains react bizarrely to near-death experiences. I’ve done my reading; I’ve asked a handful of neurologists. I know that the sensation of drowning is common, they say it’s your subconscious fighting to the surface. But for the sake of my sense of reality, my inner peace, my spiritual core, I just can’t let science explain this away from me. I’ve reached a point where I am sick of always being reasonable. My day-to-day life is anchored in reason: measuring the right doses for countless medications and gauging how they’ll interact with each other, the decoding of blood test results, the hours of rest my body needs to recover from simply going to the grocery store, the precision involved in my surgeries. I know how important it is that I be reasonable about everything else, but this experience I refuse to surrender to neurochemicals and biological data. Something happened to me there, in this place that existed so fully once upon a hospital bed. I had no memory of how I got there. I had no idea this thing, this place, this feeling, was a coma. It was my reality. But I touched something. Damn it, I touched something.
I know that I touched it because it’s been seventeen years, and I still remember every sensation. No dream is this visceral, this accessible. I felt something ancient, something metaphysical. I stepped into The Twilight Zone. I can picture Rod Serling in the Intensive Care Unit, the glow of his cigarette burning slowly between his fingers, his practiced, authoritative voice saying, “It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call, The Twilight Zone.”
You probably think I sound like a religious fanatic. That I want this to matter so badly that I’m willing to see the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. But what would you do if something changed you so profoundly and then everyone told you that it wasn’t real?
There was nothing but whiteness. My feet were bare, and the floor was cold. I could walk, but only very carefully, very slowly. I shuffled through this vast, bright expanse in a daze, with my raggedy, beloved teddy bear dangling from one hand. I was following a sound. Wait, not just a sound. Music. My music, that I love so much.
“And I swear that you don't have to go
I thought we could wait for the fireworks
And I thought we could wait for the snow
To wash over Georgia and kill the hurt
And I thought I could live in your arms
And spend every moment I had with you
Stay up all night with the stars
Confess all the faith that I had in you..”
Yes, I know that song. I keep walking.
I walk for what could’ve been minutes, hours, days. And then I hear a voice. I can’t make out the words, but I would know this voice anywhere. This voice is safe harbor, it’s one of the only signs of life, of possibility in this place. It’s the booming, comforting voice of my grandfather. Only I don’t know what he’s telling me or where he is. But I hear him. He’s close by.
Up ahead, more music. I need to find where it’s coming from, but there’s nothing here. It’s a void, it’s pure emptiness. There’s nothing here but my bare feet and my tattered teddy bear. There’s no ceiling and no sky. But music, I swear there’s music…
One final melody in this long white place.
“Awake and unafraid.
Asleep or dead…”
I can feel the cliché of the great white place, which is why I don’t usually tell people about it. But the clichés might just be clichés for a reason. The mythology, the origins of who I am, have roots in the great white place and I choose to believe in it. Something in my brain was coming back to life. Something decided that I wasn’t dead yet. Shouldn’t I respect whatever that was?
I recently went in for a surgery. After the nurse hooked up my IV and took my medical history, she approached me shyly and said, “I’m sorry if this is overstepping, but… what was it like in a coma? Was it scary to know you were stuck in a hospital bed, that you couldn’t move?”
She wasn’t overstepping, but her grasp of my comatose state was inaccurate. I had no idea that I was sick, or in a hospital, or even in a coma. Initially, I thought that I was dreaming, but then the dream never seemed to end, and it became reality. I told her this, let her know she could ask me anything considering how late the surgeon was to my appointment, and then got the inevitable follow-up, “Could you hear people talking to you?”
People want a solid, definitive answer to this question, and I wish I could give that. But the truth is: Sometimes. I only heard a few snippets in the great white place, but my family talked to me constantly. They took shifts at my bedside in unforgiving waiting room chairs, they ate out of vending machines, they forewent sleep and comfort. They brought speakers and played my iPod in the room as much as they could. And it worked. The truth is that it can work. If anyone you love is ever in a coma, never stop talking. I can’t make any promises. You don’t know what they’ll hear, but it will change them to hear it.
I’ve compared my experience to psychedelics. I have little interest in those drugs because I feel like I’ve had the hallucinogenic experience of a lifetime. And if I’m being completely honest, in the most primal, raw part of my heart, I fear that my subconscious could just yank me back to that place. That hazy, ill-defined place that doesn’t exist in time or space, yet when I go looking for the girl I once was, I realize, “Oh, that’s where I left her.”
I believe if I ever went back, I’d find her, the girl I left behind when my life stopped being ordinary or relatable or even, recognizable. God or the cosmos or whatever universal force is at play needed me to become something new in order to live the life I was meant to have, to become the person I was meant to be. The old me, she’s still there, at the bottom of the lagoon which exists between everything and nothing. She’s sunk to the bottom; her eyes are gently closed. She’s been gone for so long. She was just a child, and she was so tired. I’m glad that she’s resting.
I used to miss her desperately, the way the world felt so black and white to her, the simplicity and logic that she relied on, the future she saw for herself. But after years of turning this jagged rock over and over in my hand until it became smooth, I realized it was her time to go. I mourned her, but I believe she’s at peace.
Where I am now? I have stars, so many stars, blinking at me in a sparkling cosmic morse code and letting me know that this is real. This is happening.
I am awake.
I am alive.
