The waiting room was practically empty, not that you would have noticed anyone you didn’t trip over. You told me that you walked in slowly and made your way to the reception desk.

“Very slowly. It was hard to focus on where I was going and what I was doing. I did not want to look like I was fucking crazy in the ER.”

“Wow-” I began.

“Shut the fuck up,” you cut back in.

“Oh, you finished my sentence.”

You gave me that look. fuck

“I told the receptionist everything, she was cool about it.”

She tried to give you a clipboard and pen, to which you held up your late left hand. She apologized and gestured to the masses of empty chairs, desperate for company without typhus. A half-dead drunk was their only hope.

“Have a seat, they will call for you.”

You carefully found a chair against the wall, beneath a very large painting.

“I thought maybe I had come there to be crushed by that painting,” you told me. Fucking lunatic.

“It moves” had been the best you could come up with in the moment for what your left eye was apparently watching. “Static” was your attempt at describing what you only became aware of once you were alone with it. You told me that you initially thought the sound was a television “or something” to your left, but you looked and there was nothing. Covering your right ear, you realized that your left was hearing something else.

“Like they were on different frequencies. I do not know for sure when it started, but I did not notice it at all until then.”

You listened for a moment.

“It was not static. It was water. Or some kind of liquid, but it sounded like the ocean to me.”

You told me you turned your head to check whether the sound changed when you moved. Instead, you noticed another new twist.

“The smoke was still moving, but for a few seconds it looked like I was moving through it. Then it stopped. Or I stopped, it kept moving.”

You stood, trying to go in the direction you appeared to have been going before, but it didn’t work. The “smoke” kept twirling around, but not past you. You sat back down.

“How did you feel?”

“Curious, fascinated. But when I moved through it like that..”

You finished your sentence with your eyes accenting the loss at which you’d arrived.

You told me that it felt like you must have sat there for a long time, waiting. At some point you remembered your arm. You looked at your lifeless hand, turning it by the wrist when, to your left, came the sound of a wave.

“An ocean wave,” you specified, insisted.

“I got it,” I assured.

You remained still for another long moment out of time, trying to work this out. The “wave” had seemed to be approaching you, but the sound dissolved before it arrived. Trying simultaneously to listen, see, and feel, you found that you couldn’t think. You began breathing hard, you told me, and you suddenly realized that you could feel your heart beating, and things rapidly got out of hand.

“Every beat, the smoke moved, all of it at once. Almost like ink in water, in reverse. It was moving away from me, but was not, um, thinning. There was no empty space it was leaving behind.”

If you were capable of panic, this was the time. But not the place.

“I stood up and started towards the door. But after a couple steps, I felt pressure on my left hand, which I had just dropped when I got up. I took maybe five steps, and the pressure got unbearable. I stopped, and immediately I could hear another wave, louder and closer than before, like it was crashing into my eardrum. The smoke started moving too fast to make it out. And the pain in my hand put me on the floor. I guess I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was already getting back to my feet and the pain was gone. And so was the smoke, and the sound.”

You got your legs under you again. Your left arm hummed. Your left eye was a little blurry. Your left ear was ringing very slightly – but they had all come back.

“How did you feel?”

“Pretty. Blitzed.”