It was dark; a numbing, strict, adamantine dark. It was the kind of dark where you feel as if something dreadful is about to happen; or already has. Mother Nature dared not to move. She was dismayed. She was astounded. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there. All I knew was that it did not feel right. I was living a dream in which I didn’t know what was going on. I was only living in the present. I had no clue what the past was, or what the future will be. I felt as if I was the only one there. I could hear my own breath, a deep sigh, in and out. The only foreign sound was a simple “Drip, drop,” in the distance. It echoed with every splash. It shattered the eternal silence. It was damp. I could smell the rotting of the trees and the dew on the mangled, muddy weeds. The water condensation latched onto my face and mud covered me from head to toe.

I attempted to get up. I brought my legs up under me and collapsed. A sharp pain jolted itself upon my chest with every breath. I made a drastic attempt to sit up. I moved my left leg with all of my strength up to my chest. The pain was striking me all over, but I was determined. I knew that if I was going to live that I would have to get out of here. The first step was to stand up. I pushed and I pulled. The pain was the greatest pain I had ever felt. It was like somebody was stabbing me with a thousand tiny needles and leaving them in my skin to rot. The iron taste of blood entered my mouth with every push to my feet. It refreshed my mouth with the only bit of liquid it felt in many hours. I was like a stream, slowly flowing through a dry, barren desert. I knew that if I made it through this, all else would seem easy, so I received a burst of power and strength and finally got to my feet. When I got up I felt as if I had been dangling upside down for hours. The blood was rushing around my head and I almost fainted from the lightheadedness.

I began to trudge around and soon I saw a blazing fire. The smell of my singeing hair was nauseating. The skipping feeling in my mind and the churning feeling in my stomach was not helping my fanatical state of mind. In the glow, I saw somebody; a girl. She was motionless; just lying there in the cold darkness. I trudged over to her and knelt down beside her. Blood covered her whole body. It was slowly trickling from a gash marked in her side, following a constant stream across the pavement.

I began to hear a soft siren in the background. I ignored it, but it became louder and louder until I could not ignore it any longer. It was annihilating my eardrums with the extremity of each whine it poured out onto those empty streets. I turned my head and was almost blinded by the blue and red flashing lights coming near. A voice then cut through the silence like a sharp blade. I immediately fell backward into the pavement with shock.

Blackness, darkness, nothing; that was all it turned to in a split second. There was nothing to see, nothing to feel, nothing to taste, and nothing to smell. Time was nothing. The nothingness of my new world was almost too much. I had lain in that world for a long time until a sound was heard by my yearning ears. It was a voice; a delicate voice. I couldn’t understand it at all, but I didn’t mind. I tried to make the most of it, but within seconds, it was gone.

So again, I waited there. I waited there to hear that voice again. I waited to be able to be alive again. I waited to be human again. I was always listening in the nothingness for a sound; something to calm me, to satisfy me. My ears were becoming withered by nothing. But, then I heard it again. This time I was familiar with this event and I wasn’t going to let it go. I focused and listened. Every single bit of my strength was being focused on that sound at that moment. And then, something miraculous occurred; something unknown to me for a time which felt like forever. When it happened, I didn’t know what it was. I became so engulfed in the forever nothingness of my world that I had been shunned from my senses. But then it came back to me. I realized what it was. It was something that I had been longing for an extremely long time. And that thing was sight.