My mouth is suddenly dry. “Then how come I still feel lost?”
“Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch Schitt’s Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as unsettled.”
I think about surrealist paintings, how you can be startled out of your understanding of what the world should be. To my surprise, tears spring to my eyes. “What if that’s not the problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I could dream about the Galápagos,” I whispered. “I liked it better there.”
The psychologist tilts her head, pity written on her face. “Who wouldn’t,” she says.
In my past life, I’d groan when my alarm went off and choke down a piece of toast with my coffee and join the millions of people in New York City getting from point A to point B. I’d spend my days buried in work, a mountain that only seemed to get higher the more I climbed it, and when I came home I was too tired to deal with groceries or cook so I ordered in. Sometimes Finn was here, sometimes he was doing an overnight at the hospital. There were weekends I worked but also weekends when I took walks to Chelsea Piers, down the High Line, through Central Park. I’d force myself not to think about office politics or what I could be hammering away at on my laptop to get a head start on the coming week. I’d go to the gym and watch rom-coms on my phone while running on the treadmill.
Now, I have nothing to do and nothing but time. I can cook, but only if I can find a time slot for grocery deliveries, and only if they have the actual ingredients I ask for. And there’s only so much homemade bread a single human can consume.
I finish Tiger King. (I think she’s totally guilty.) I binge Nailed It! I become obsessed with Room Rater, and after seeing a pundit on television I immediately go to see how their home space fared. I hold virtual happy hours with Rodney from his sister’s home in New Orleans. I stop wearing pants with buttons. Sometimes, I just cry until I can’t anymore.
One day, I type Coma dreams into the search bar of Facebook.
There are two videos and a link to a story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The first video is a woman who was in a coma for twenty-two days after giving birth. When she woke up, she did not recognize her baby, or remember that she had been pregnant. While unconscious, she’d found herself in a palace and her job there was to interview cats—all of which were dressed like courtiers, and all of which could talk. In the video, she shows sketches she has created of each of them, with tiny ruffs or dangling diamond eardrops or velvet doublets.
“My God,” I whisper out loud. Do I sound as unhinged as that?
The second video is another woman. “When I was in a coma,” she says, “my brain decided that the hospital was a conspiracy theory. My ex-boss—I was a barista, before the accident—owned the hospital and millions of other corporations. In real life, she’s kind of flaky and has a misspelled Chinese tattoo. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a contract with her and I didn’t want to. She got so mad she kidnapped my mother and my brother and said that if I didn’t sign the contract, they’d die. Now, I was in a coma just for two days, but this went on for weeks. I went all over the country trying to find friends who had money I could borrow. I flew on jets and stayed at hotels and saw things at places I’ve never been to in my life—but when I came out of the coma and looked them up on the internet, there they were.” There’s a muffled question, and she shrugs. “Like that shiny mirrored bean in Chicago,” she says. “And this place in Kansas that has a twenty-thousand-pound ball of twine inside. I mean, why would I have known that?”